Ask Lemmy

Kinda, I'm frustrated at how little time I have in general more than anything.

I already don't have kids, I barely socialize anymore except with my gf on the weekends and occasional texts with friends, I work from home, even when I skip chores it still feels like barely enough time.

At one point I was convinced it was distractions, little minutes here little minutes there, it adds up, so I cut them out, and yeah I was more productive, but I also felt like absolute shit, every day was the same, work, study, life admin, chores, sleep etc etc. even then, it was barely, barely enough, and I often had to isolate myself for a week straight and blitz through whatever I wanted to do.

For instance learning about return oriented programming, over the span of 2 weeks of practically ignoring everything else I went from not really understanding computer memory beyond the fact that pointers exist in C to finding basic stack based buffer overflow vulns, creating an appropriate payload for shellcode, and eventually creating ROPchains without hints on retired hackthebox machines.

There was about 200 pages of notes I wrote by hand in there somewhere, explaining it to my future self in case I'd forget some subtle details and observations that helped my understanding.

To even scratch the surface of such a subject, it took me 2 weeks of doing it almost to the complete exclusion of everything else, including work. Maybe I'm just dumb as a rock, but frankly - I was pretty fucking proud of myself, in as far as the sheer intellectual challenge of it, it was glorious. But not sustainable, sadly.

Even if the worry and stress of "omg I haven't even said anything to my coworkers in weeks imma be fired" didn't catch up to me, the pace and an internal demand for "progress" eventually caught up to me and I got so burned out I fell into a full blown months long depression I'm still crawling my way out of.

I knew that I probably overdid it with the pressure I put myself under, so I relaxed, I decided that I'm gonna build a gaming PC and play some vidya games I've had in my backlog for probably years - maybe I'd start making music again.

So I did, I got into some games I liked but even still, beating them and experiencing them fully took up a lot of time, so did creating music, and I just ended up burning out even further. Every second I do anything I would ever want to do, I'm falling behind on doing things I should be doing, which is never want to do unless I absolutely had to (work).

I want to read more into things, to think about them more, feel them more, ponder and understand, and to do so in a relaxed way free of time pressure.

Oh sure I could glance up a history topic on Wikipedia or listen to some talking head drone on in the background for 20 minutes, but to really understand much of anything, it takes time.

Oh sure I could slap together a song in frankly about an hour, and my friends and family say it's great, so surely it must be (/s) but at this stage even as an amateur I understand that to flesh things out I simply need more time and it's time I just never ever seem to have.

Oh sure I could get a basic grasp of how one would go about reverse engineering or what assembly is, but to read even basic assembly programs and find your misplaced NOPsled in that program and understand not just that things are wrong and fix it in a "monkey see, monkey do" fashion but understand the why of all of it - that takes a lot more time, at least for me.

I started playing some Paradox games recently because they were a thing I used to really enjoy but had to drop, and I'm just about to finish my first campaign in Vic3 1.9, which I haven't played since launch, with Morgenröte and E&F and BPM mods and I'm just over 200 hours into this campaign at 1909 and I still feel I'm skipping over so much nuance and detail, not to mention I never reload an older save and play around with anything and I have the game running pretty much constantly at 5 speed, I'm loving it so much, it's healing in every way, but I just don't really know where I'm meant to get those 200 hours from to enjoy it.

Maybe it's like that "HealthyGamerGG" grifter on YouTube said - "failing to coalesce", a sensationalist way of saying that one lacks a focus, coated in shame and guilt to hide the opinion validating this demand as reasonable underneath.

Frankly I don't want to have a focus of any kind. If I want to - I will.

It's very pretentious but I really feel like I relate to Nietzche's bit about "not being done" when he mocked the German education system in "Twilight of the Idols" for pumping out eager soldiers and servants rather than what he saw as people reaching their own potential, (at least in my interpretation when reading it).

It's like, samesies bestie, I'm a human being, not a fucking meal, I'll be done when I want to be, and not a minute sooner.

And when it comes to "doomscrolling" - I wrote this post and it took me about 30 minutes, more or less as a matter of principle, I wanted to express myself fully and clearly even if it is ultimately self-defeating in carrying the message across and only be done when I think the thought is concluded, not when some external command demands it of me. Which is about now.