I think this has been put in different words in different places before, but I’ve just realized how often I live this reality.
I go to work in the morning. I sit in my office chair with my keyboard with Cherry switches. Quiet, tactile. I stare at my two monitors for hours. Teams is on my laptop screen, reminding me of my corporate existence.
Terminal on monitor one with tmux. I keep opening new windows in the session because I lose track of which window was originally intended for which purpose. Vim is open at least five separate times. Some have one file, some have fifteen tabs with various files. Some have fifteen tabs open to the same file. “Where did that pane go with the long command I don’t want to type out again?” I have no idea. I type the command out again.
The computer will not do what I want it to do. I threaten the computer. The computer will still not do what I want it to do. I bargain with the computer. Load average is 16. This computer is an embedded system with four cores. That’s bad. I move the computer to a different port on the network switch. The load average is 0.75. That’s good. However, that makes no sense.
Firefox on the other monitor. Half of the thirty tabs are Stack Exchange. The other half are the community forum for the chip vendor for our embedded system. None of the tabs contain useful information.
I go home. I sit in my office chair with my keyboard with Cherry switches. These ones are clicky because my wife doesn’t have the heart to shank me over a loud keyboard. I stare at my two monitors for hours. No Teams.
I do the same thing. The details are different, but it’s just as painful. I’m upstairs, the computer I’m threatening is downstairs instead of in a nest of cables on my desk. I spend hours building a CUDA-based library, only to be told by the runtime that my drivers are too old. I need to tear out this runtime and install an older one. The computer cannot hear my threats due to the physical separation. Maybe I need to set a desk up in the basement.
I go to bed. Tomorrow, I will do the same thing.
edit: your concerns are appreciated, but I enjoy this cycle for reasons I do not comprehend. There is no spoon, there is no grass. There is only computer.
I have the benefit (? depends on who you ask) of working from an office and I bike to work, so there’s some nice physical activity separating work from home. I don’t like going over 40 hours a week at work, I’m pretty good about that. More time to threaten computers at home instead of at work.
It’s get home, make dinner for myself and my wife, watch an episode of Deep Space Nine and talk about our days, then I go upstairs to be a monkey at a typewriter.
That’s good, but you’re still the perfect of that meme where the stick figure is looking at the computer while the weather changes outside the window. By your account, that is.
Since it sounds like that’s a source of stress or unease for you, I think you could experiment with a “month of drawing” of “month of evening bike rides” or something like that. I love problem-solving and development, so it’s easy to look for that thrill outside of work too, but you may find a different thrill that gives you more variety and you also find rewarding.
In my case, I often get away from computers by going out on photo walks. Then I get home and stare at my photos on the computer. Hehe. It’s good to have that outlet all the same.
You might want to find a different variety of threats
Sometimes I threaten microcontrollers instead of computers. Both at work and at home. Does that count?
You seem to only be changing the subjects that you are threatening.
Try also changing the types of threats you give to those subjects. Easier to keep them in line.
I’ll start to include “being repurposed as a Bitcoin miner”.