Saturday, May 11th, 2024

So Long, Sunday Scaries

Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.
—James Joyce, Ulysses

I'm recovering from burnout. I don't mean that in the piteous sense of recently suffering a nasty fall or the flu and now in need of some help getting groceries up the stairs. No, I mean to say I'm actually getting much better after having burned out and then unburned out. A corner has been rounded!1

These days, most mornings, I wake up and celebrate as the memory dawns that I don't have to work for THE INTERNET today.2 This being the weekend, I instead celebrate that I don't have to work for THE INTERNET on MONDAY! The Sunday Scaries have been defeated.3

I feel much calmer. I'm no longer stressed and vaguely annoyed at all times—and this during the apocalypse, no less. I believe I'm thinking more clearly, too. It's hard to say for sure because my new job at THE AIRPLANES requires me to cram a lot of information into my brain while learning a new tech stack, industry, business, and political environment.4 Subjectively, I feel like a moron, but objectively, I'm probably doing alright for someone who didn't know his PNR from an SSR a few months ago.

Despite technically working more hours than before, I have more time now.5 It's assuredly my perception of time that has changed somehow. I'm still wasting far too many off-hours online, but now I can feel them passing, along with a heightened sense of boredom and unsatisfactoriness at all the Caturdays, memes, uninspired grandstanding, and endless parades of motte-and-baileys. Of course, I do enjoy the pretty pictures.

Best of all, I'm not working on the front end anymore, so I even actively enjoy programming computers again. Beep boop.

  1. UX will be overjoyed by the news. ↩︎

  2. The people working for THE INTERNET are overwhelmingly great. In my seven years at the town data mine, I may have worked directly with at least a thousand people, only encountering a half-dozen or so bad apples, and most of them were mostly harmless. However, the technologies, infrastructure, and processes we built for ourselves to work within were excruciating. Imagine the movie Brazil set in the same universe as Office Space meets the movie Office Space set in Brazil's universe. ↩︎

  3. We shouldn't need an expression like Sunday Scaries. There is no reason billions of us should have to work so hard at jobs we hate to make the world go round—under threat of starvation, exposure, and disease, no less. Oligarchs and warlords have commandeered modern technology's phenomenal efficiencies only to ransom back to us tawdry indulgences in exchange for the greater measure of our waking lives. I'm no commie, but we've got a lousy system going the world over. ↩︎

  4. It might surprise you to learn that the airline industry is both complex and complicated.6 Quite so, as a matter of fact. ↩︎

  5. To their credit, THE INTERNET is excellent about handing out PTO. ↩︎

  6. Probably not.7 ↩︎

  7. I learned to use footnotes from Terry Pratchett. ↩︎

Nouvelle Vague - Guns Of Brixton (Full Track)

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