Creativity

#creatvity #personal

So I have a creativity problem.

At least, I am unsatisfied with how I allot my time for personal projects.

What?

Okay, so like 90% of current day people, I am somewhat addicted to the internet. My personal vices are YouTube and Reddit, and some fediverse equivalents. If I'm not careful, I will waste extraordinary amounts of time on these websites, despite having much more fulfilling things I could be doing.

Now being a full time programmer and a father to small children, I don't have a lot of spare time to begin with. And If I spend that precious spare time looking at websites, I feel like crap afterwards, and inevitably, everything I consumed just drains out of my brain and I remember nothing.

I'm sure many can relate, especially to the last part.

So don't do that then?

The real kicker is that, there are some things I actually do like to watch. Especially on Nebula, they have a lot of good shows, check them out (not sponsored). The real problem is I will keep scrolling and watching long past the point where I get any enjoyment out of it.

Before I know it, 2 hours have passed, it's half-past eleven at night, and I've got nothing to show for it.

How can I fix this?

I've tried app / website blockers, and they haven't really stopped me from obsessively scrolling. I have gotten really efficient at unlocking them.

But just this very day, I came across this YouTube video.

(Hey look at that, I can embed it! Here is a standalone link for people that want it. The Habit That FORCES Your Brain to STOP Consuming)

I think I've seen other videos with a similar sentiment, but this is the one that actually made me think. And it gave me a great idea.

My great idea

So, I started this blog with the idea that I'd post about my projects. It worked while I was building the site itself and its build script, and I made a little game of life clone but programming, but then I stopped writing for here.

I think I had this grand vision for this site, that I'd post about all the cool projects I was making. But then, after my brainlife project, I didn't really have a good next project idea. I played around with a couple of prototypes, but they didn't really go anywhere.

After that, not really sure what to do, I ended up going back to my comfortable place of bingeing the internet, and feeling shitty about it.

All I've done here is raise the barrier to posting on my site too high. I'm probably at a better place than a lot of other internet addicts, in that I already make projects, game prototypes and the like. I just don't do it as much as I'd like. So I'm just going to be less precious about articles here.

So, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to lower the bar, and write more, about dumber things. I mean, no one's reading this but me are they?

Self-therapy

In a way, in addition to farting out more dumb articles, I'm going to use this to sort out my own thoughts in general.

The world at large is pretty fucked up at the moment, and just the act of organising my thoughts into words is pretty good at cutting through the general muck that depression can cause.

(Side note: I'm not really depressed anymore, but I was in my youth, and from experience, while it can go quiet, it never really goes away.)

The conlang toki pona can help here. I've learnt the words, and while I'm not as active in the community as I'd like to be, because of its extremely small vocabulary, it forces you to break concepts down so far that you can't help but understand them better. You can't mask your real feelings with fancy vocabulary when you only have 130 words to work with.

That'll do

So, that's where I'm at. How're you doing? If anyone got this far, thanks! Tell me about your favourite programming language wherever you found this.

Now that that seriousness is over, I'm going to fart out a dumb article.

pona tawa sina a!