I've been thinking over the last week or so about the funk that I have been in for nearly a decade now. Having removed myself quite forcefully from the dopamine fountain that is the modern web I began to realise that what I'm missing isn't really a hobby or occupation but rather a project.
I'm one of those people that if they have no long task to dedicate themselves to they become aimless and lethargic. It's because of this that I was last truly fulfilled when I was at college, when I had a long list of things to write, and no way around it. I simply had to sit in front of a keyboard and crack it out.
It was during this time that I discovered GNU/Linux, when I was looking for something to typeset my documents, but had no way of downloading the massive library of LaTeX within an acceptible timeframe. Hunting through my various discs I found some old copies of Red Hat (this was before Fedora, I believe) which handily came with groff on one of them. Without networking, or any distractions I pounded that keyboard into oblivion with a level of focus and industriousness that I can hardly believe now.
My grades are irrelevant, but I was more than pleased with them.
What I'm trying to say is that I need something like this in order to properly function. What hobbies that I have, I now realise, really don't matter all that much in terms of my own personal well-being. Rather it is this task, The Project, that I am really missing in my life at the moment. So what's a man to do? Well, for one I have been thinking about something that I can dedicate myself to with the depth of focus that I once had, and I have several ideas...
See you next time.