Six Ways to Boost Mental Immunity

When I believed game design was the most amazing thing ever, and that anything learned could be applied thereby--when one mind could compose music, illustrate characters, and program the abstract engine powering an interactive story--I spent all my time camped in the lab, furiously learning C++ and working on a submission to a Masters in Game Dev.

What kept me going was the inner belief that I could figure out a way through any problem, that there was always some possibility of an answer. Programming to me was about starting, hitting a wall, overcoming the hurdle, hitting the next wall, figuring it out, and so on.

That worked, and has worked, but now I have more tabs, (e)books, courses, and tasks than I can reasonably tackle, and life ticks on. (This comment may have consumed nearly a precious hour of discretionary time!)

I always resolve to start from first principles: enter all these notes somewhere, track the data somehow, and systematize a learning cycle. Make room for deliberate practice, and data logging (hey, I tricked myself into time tracking).

My biggest hurdle now is, how do I trust hard drives? Silly, right? I schedule a SMART cron and now I'm set: I'll set up backups and dotfiles, and get right back to learning and learning. Oh, but we ought to use git. And, every app has to be 12-factor. Oh, but we have to use Domain-Driven Design and sequence diagrams...

It's worse if the prerequisites to your dreams are an unbounded graph of books. Which to tackle in what order and so on.

Once I figure things out, I promise myself there will be a webpage (mobile-first, of course) and a signup form for a newsletter. Oh!--but I need to roll my own email server first...

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The mind flayer stares intently at a handheld mimic--the closest thing you'd call it, anyway--and ignores you for half an eternity. Some manic lights flicker in the reflection of its eyes as an unseen mouth yells random sounds.

/* Sorry, I was doomscrolling again. */ You've heard your own (inner) voice before, but this is like hearing Granularenvy's Draconic in a giant cavern right in your ear, after her breath extinguished your torch.

"You looked at that thing for hours." Nothing nearby to serve, but you can speak. That's not nothing.

/* Yeah, it's the doom of our society. We had to get rid of these. Everyone stopped tending to everything. We're afraid of missing out on stuff beyond, although that was never something we worried about. */