Braindrain

It’s been a month since I’ve decided to put my mind at ease and try to live my life as if I am retired. My expectations have been relatively met, while in some ways they’ve yet to bring in any results. I do feel calmer, but I’m not at the desired point of relaxed attitude as of today. I didn’t think I would get there within a short time frame, but I am making progress: I’m becoming more and more aware of when I have the choice to act or react, instead of just relying on pure instinct and reflex. While this ended up being a good thing and in a way mentally refreshing, it also ended up going overboard (go figure).

Just like the day I am writing this, I feel like I have zero motivation to do anything at all. Actually no, that’s worded badly, as I DO FEEL the motivation to create, but I simply do not feel like starting or continuing anything I had planned. Normally everyone would scream “burnout”, but having known what that state of mind is like, I can assure at least myself that it is not that. It’s something wildly different, which the average person would probably label as: Laziness.

Yup, somehow I’ve become the living embodiment of a couch potato and I’m not really happy about it. I haven’t really been able to touch any of my hobbies lately, the most I’ve accomplished is continuing watching the original Star Trek from time to time, having finished the series over the weekend. But that’s not exactly a “task” more so just part of my entertainment. Albeit I have to also admit that I haven’t really felt like watching anything in these past weeks (I generally tend to go through an episode of something or half a movie every night before sleeping), which kind of started to irk me.

Sure, I don’t necessarily NEED to do any of this, but I have become accustomed to such as part of a daily ritual to unwind from both work and life. Although I’ll have to add that my current job is the very definition of “cushy”, so if anything I think I have subconsciously become extremely contempt with my current situation, even if there’s drawbacks to it.

During the day, I have a quite a bit of downtime and have utilized these moments to do whatever at my workplace (perks of being unsupervised), but effectively my personal activities have almost stopped this past month, making me accomplish barely anything. I focus on the task at hand, finish it, then stare into the void until the next one comes along. If I was planning on living on as a mindless droid, this would be considered great, but I have more aspirations than that. I need to get back on track and continue my writings and developing games, but my mind simply refuses to do anything unless I start poking it with a stick.

However, through all this, by some mere coincidence I have started tackling Python again. I’ve put studying the language on the back-burner last year, as I had become stuck and annoyed at the available resources being absolutely horse-shit garbage. Any book that was recommended or that I could find, was as horrendously structured and edited, so much so that I’ve been having flashbacks to my much hated school days. Dry and boring material, with no real explanations or care put behind the information that it’s trying to deliver. Let alone information I wanted not only wasn’t available in any of the material, I struggled to even google the answers, as I had no idea how to properly formulate my questions. I can’t remember who was it that said it, but the most important aspect of studying has always been about asking the proper questions, which I admittedly failed at in regards of programming, as I lacked the proper terms and definitions to begin with. When you start to learn something new to you, if you do not have the necessary basic knowledge made available to you, you’ll struggle to progress by yourself.

So I was in a bit of a pitfall, being unable to climb out as I simply couldn’t thematically define what I wanted to know. That is: In layman’s terms I could, but the important keywords were always missing from my searches, thus ending up with me uselessly browsing the internet, getting further away from where I wanted to be. A friend of mine had asked me how I was doing in my endeavors, and I could only express my frustrations to him about this goddamn labyrinth I was stuck in, with seemingly no way out.

On a fateful day, about a week ago, one of my coworkers requested a leave of absence, so our schedules got shuffled around a bit. I ended up working together with someone I generally only converse through the phone and only about work. We hit if off quite well and after the usual small talk, somehow got talking about programming. We both have an interest in it, albeit with different languages, so we compared notes on what the best way for each would be to study. Turns out he had paid for an online course, done by a company which was rumored to be going under. After hearing the name I realized I’ve briefly seen mentions of it on Reddit, so we hit up the net, and ended up finding out that multiple companies are closing down. Absolutely great.

Lot of users were putting in their two cents about why this was happening: apparently there’s too many coders and not enough jobs available at the moment, and since said companies couldn’t guarantee jobs anymore (that was their whole shtick: you do the course, they get you a job), people stopped paying for their services. Okay, so what now?

Well, turns out, at the very bottom of the comments, there was someone with the answer to both of our problems: Harvard. Apparently the university had made quite a few of their courses available online for the price of $0. Unless you want to receive an official certificate, signed by the dean, then you’d have to pay a bit of money, but otherwise you can study a lot of subjects for completely free.

Now this all sounds dandy and all, but isn’t Harvard supposed to be one of the tougher schools out there? Even if it’s purely an online course, surely it wouldn’t be easy to get through it, right? Wrong.

As doubtful as I was, I registered for the python introductory course, started watching the recorded classes and my mind was blown: I understood everything. Within the first 3 videos, I’ve managed to get PAST the point at which I was last year, finding out the information I had been lacking. HOW?

The simple answer is: the course thus far was done very well, with an easy to understand teacher, who actually kept building up your knowledge bit by bit, always relying on previously shown concepts.

The complicated answer is: I was right, the books that were recommended suck donkey dick. I’m not as stupid as I had assumed, and it’s not that I’m incapable of learning programming at this age, I just had the wrong “teachers” all along. Fucking hell, why didn’t anyone recommend me doing Harvard courses before? Why were all the people online telling everyone to study the crappy books which should have been only used to start a fire on a cold winter night? What is wrong with you lot?

The way I’m seeing things now though, I’ll be able to write basic programs within a couple of months. Nothing extravagant, but definitely usable applications for automation or misc tasks. Okay, I sill don’t think I’m going to do anything creative for a while, but having python by my side would end up speeding development time of my games for sure. Let alone I’ll be able to re-purpose this skill into other areas of life as well, so it’s a win-win situation really. I have a hunch that after all this, I’ll be able to get back to creating again.