The last year or two of my life has been a whirlwind. Looking back at it now, it's clear that I've been going through a transition from the pandemic era to the post-pandemic era. Pre-pandemic, I was a wannabe genre fiction writer who had moved to an up-and-coming city in the American southwest to take a job in a software company. My days were occupied with work or socializing about town. My mornings (and some evenings) revolved around imagining fantastical disaster scenarios in which the human r...

Why bother working at all? Or why do anything at all? Aside from the need for income for practical reasons, there are a couple major reasons that motivate us. For me the major reason since I was in high school has been to prove myself. Unfortunately, this is a motivation that usually starts with poor self-image. A realized in the last year that a lot of my motivation for many of the things I do started with a poor self-image problem, including my athletic hobbies, career, and academics. This...

The last year I've slowly unpacked my case of burnout and depression. I've begun to understand that this isn't just an isolated incident, but rather something that has been with me my whole life. When I was young, I felt unsupported and unvalued. I had a few bad experiences in my formative years that left me with some psychological scars in the form of low self-esteem, low confidence, and overall a lack of self-love. When I came of age, I found that I could supplement that lack of love with th...

Think back to times in your life when you were really happy. Try to come up with at least three different times. What do these time periods have in common? Were they times when you were buying a lot of cool new gadgets? Were they times when you drove a nice car? My guess is that your financial situation and purchases probably had nothing to do with it. In fact, a lot of people remember the times they were young and financially strapped as the most happy times in their life, even when they st...

The previous entry I titled here "Life Is Easy. We Make It Hard." I read over that this morning and pondered what I was trying to get at. What am I trying to say? A journal is essentially a man talking to himself. What does a man have to say to himself that he does not know? The mind is a complicated thing. The human mind is not like a computer hard drive with a set of files stored in a precise location able to be recalled instantly. It is more like a vast country of rolling hills, with littl...

Here I am writing my (almost) daily reflection. I feel like I have a weight on my shoulders. I have responsibilities that seem like burdens. Often this feeling is clustered around my job – or not having a job – or looking for a new job. The weight sometimes feels unbearable, that the only option is to retire and take a new lower stress career. I fantasize about driving a delivery truck. I know there would be stress involved but I would at least be on my feet. At various points in my life, I'v...

I've been moving the last week and dealing with a series of comic errors that have occurred throughout the process. At various times, I had to stop and think, "wait, am I really able to deal with this problem right now?" And a lot of times, the answer was "no." I learned a while ago of this acronym HALT. It stands for: Hungry Angry Lonely Tired I love the American efficiency of these kind of acronyms. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that it came from the military. HALT captures the condi...

One of the persistent changes in society that I see most affecting me and my peers is the concept of home. Back when my parents and grandparents were my age, people tended to stay pretty close to where they grew up. It took a century for my father's Irish-Catholic family to begin drifting out of the Chicago region. Even working class people were expected to put together a down payment in their early 20s to buy a 30-year home loan. Then it was typical to live in that home for the full 30-year l...

When I was younger, starting out in the tech industry, I was so bored in my comfortable and unglamorous job at a big travel website company. In retrospect, I was very lucky to get that job. It helped me survive from 2008 - 2011, and gave me a foothold on my resume to go on to bigger and better things. In college I got into an internship but I had turned down the full-time offer I got from the bank I interned at. Then I floundered around for a while, working odd jobs and trying to find a living ...

We live in interesting times. Everyone reading this went through the same very strange black-swan event at the same time. You know exactly what I’m talking about. This event affected every aspect of our society, and personally affected each of us in profound ways, but I want to especially focus on the effect on work. One consequence of the Event was that many of us were entered into a mass experiment with remote work, whether we liked it or not. Every office in the world shutdown for a period o...

Innovation is creative work. To do creative work, you have to go through many rough drafts. Sometimes you have to invest time into an idea that doesn't work out, but which reveals some other idea that makes exploring that first idea worth it. Or sometimes it doesn't work at all, and you move on to the next idea. This process is completely antithetical to corporate workplaces, and one reason why I do not trust any large corporation's claim that it is able to "innovate." Maybe this happens in som...

I don't really like remote working, but it is currently the only option I can find. Tech companies during the pandemic all closed their offices. A lot of companies went out of business as the pandemic destroyed the economy. Those that survive let their leases expire. Even the big-name company I worked at before only half-finished the office buildout they began in 2020. I work remotely, but I don't have a quiet home office or a nice home to enjoy between Zoom calls. My overpriced apartment is in...

We all face difficulties in life. It is only natural that we should, since in order to satisfy all our instinctual drives, the world would have to completely change. We make plans and go out into the world seeking to fulfill those plans, only to find, time and time again, that we are met by obstacles that prevent us from advancing. We need an approach that takes these inevitable obstacles into account. The following system works for me. I definite two categories of obstacle: problems and chall...

Or: How I Learned To Hate The Housing Market (Originally written in early 2022.) Americans love houses, to an irrational degree. The idea of owning your own home is part of the "American dream" that seems to be more often derided today, and rarely embraced in earnest. Along with cars and credit cards, the love of houses approaches cult-like obsession in the United States. Americans from all walks of life pursue home ownership with a maniacal glee, as though it were the only financial goal wort...

I used to hoard huge amounts of books. I collected every book I could get my hands on and accumulated for four years in my first solo apartment, which had three huge Ikea book cases. Then when I had to leave, I parted with about half of those books, only to replenish the hoard later. For some reason, I just have a hard time letting go of books, and they seem to re-appear in my home if I am not vigilant. I think one reason was the "fantasy self." I liked to imagine I was a different person than ...

I was fortunate to have the security team at Cloudflare reach out to me in late 2020. This was at the height of the pandemic. I interviewed in November and December 2020, and accepted the offer the following January. I was managing a system that was processing a huge influx of data and where uptime really mattered. It was a great engineering challenge. I inherited a system built for much smaller volume, and had to quickly plot a course to scaling it up. I was working 10-12 hours a day most days...

Growing up, I was always a fairly introverted kid, prone to day-dreaming, reading, and tinkering with things. Every holiday, my parents got together with my aunt and her kids. The cousin closest in my age, Nathan, was also the one most similar to me, and the one who has had the most impact on me. Nathan was a very smart kid, but also very introverted. He had trouble socially adapting. He finally came into his own in high school. Nathan was really into video games and taught himself graphics pro...

Many friends who have known me over the years tell me that my home and my way of life is very minimalist. I often feel the opposite, that my home is bursting to the seams with stuff and I waste entirely too much money and time on silly things that bring me no pleasure. In any case, I definitely do like minimalism, and my biggest inspirations are from Japan. First is the "extreme" minimalist, Fumio Sasaki. The other is the more famous Mari Kondo. Both of these authors present answers to the ques...

1 For many years, my life plan was to have as many pleasures as possible while also making money and saving for the future. I didn't have any plans for what to do with this money, but it seemed important to be saving it. I wanted to live in a downtown area of an urban center for convenience and access to bars, restaurants, and gyms. Looking back at it now, it is the luxurious life of a "yuppie" that I desired, though I chose a more spartan design aesthetic. Minus the saving money bit, this is...

Hello. Welcome to my journal. What kind of way is that to start? I guess it would make more sense to start with, hello, my name is... Well, I'm not going to tell you my name. After playing around with different options for how to structure this spiel, I've decided I prefer to keep this journal pseudonymous. This blog is a record of what I think I can be accurately called burnout. It is a record of the years 2023–2024 and likely beyond, with some notes and descriptions of the years the pre...