January 2025 month notes
January is pretty depressing for me. It’s not just the dark. Or the lack of F1. Or the end of advent. I don’t know.
I have never been capital D depressed, which is awesome. It feels like a superpower because so many of my peers don’t have the same luxury, or they have some of the same luxury only after taking some pills.
There is a spectrum for me, that goes like this:
| Depressed | Burned out | Dysthymic | No energy | Some energy | Inspired | Actualising |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Never been here | Been here when I left my last job | What I mean by this is “having no enjoyment in your usual pursuits”, and every moment is spent trying to “get through it” to the next moment. Lacking presence and joy. | Steady, but with no interest or energy to create, write, play, etc. | Enough energy to write or play a little. Or imagine something. | Excited by interests and personal projects. | Finding and creating time to make and do all manner of things. Making the renaissance happen in your mind and home. |
I should note that in all of these that I’ve experienced, the bins still go out, the dishwasher still gets loaded and unloaded, and the children still get bathed and put to bed by a Dad that cares about them. So that’s how I’m guessing that I’ve never been all the way to the left, as I gather some or all of those things stop when you’re Actually Depressed.
I think I am now in the “Some energy” zone.
Work is hard
I’m being stretched in my role for the first time in a while. I pray night and morning that I would have passion and energy for the things I have to do, the things I want to do, and the things I have control over. I want to be a good Lead Dev!
There has been some low grade drama and change at work which has a negative effect on me mentally. That should pass in fairly short order.
Acheivement Simulator 3000
I have been playing Big Pharma for an hour or two a week on free evenings. Believe it or not, this represents a kind of progress for me, because even an Acheivement Simulator like video games shows some desire of my brain to acheive things in a creative way. I can put machines together and optimise a business carefully with lots of pausing and planning and execution, and get rewarded with a little purple “Master” rank on each scenario and a badge that goes on my Steam profile saying “You’re in the top 0.7% of players!” (of a nine year old game with mediocre ratings 🙂)
Genuinely, I got a master rank on a scenario the other day that I’d been working on for two weeks of evenings, and I felt emotional about it.
Now, I know that if I’d spent those 8-10 hours on one of my projects I could have made inordinate progress. I have to forgive myself though, because in fact I didn’t have energy to put the hours into coding and research with uncertain outcomes. I almost certainly would have given up after two hours if I’d hit a roadblock. What I did have energy for, was generating £30M of imaginary revenue for Griffmed.
There’s no lesson here.
Look at this, I’m writing
I’m writing at this very moment! which is great. It’s great. Getting these undercooked ideas out onto the blog is fuel. It has a positive feedback effect. More makes more.
In my notebook
I have designed a virtual machine based on a grid of 16 cells and a state machine configured by an unlimited list of 8-byte state transitions. I don’t think I’ll ever implement this but I might post photos of it. More on this if I can be bothered.
I designed month names and day names for an international 13 month calendar, where each month name has a different starting letter and is phonetically and visually distinctive. More on that maybe never.
I drafted a design for a worker placement board game for under-5s, based on monkeys in the jungle making banana and mango smoothies and ice lollies. ChatGPT helped appraise the design and had some remarkable feedback.
Just nerd stuff.
Coming up
We were really smart to have kids in February and March because those are some boring months. The Super Bowl happens, the Great Pottery Throwdown finishes and then there’s no good event television until F1 starts in April.
Birthdays really do keep the family hum of excitement rolling along and give you something to look forward to, so, thanks kids!
In conclusion
It was kind of a difficult month but everything is getting better. This is the cycle of life and it’s ok.
It’s also Tết Nguyên Đán (Lunar/Chinese New Year) today! I hope no-one around here gets into the fireworks tonight because it keeps the kids awake and upset and I want to get a takeaway!
Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! 🎇🌱