Stuck in the loop
I sometimes have this bad habit of trying to watch YouTube videos while I work. It is never as productive as I want it to be. Often times I’ll just sit there, endlessly scrolling while I try to find something interesting. Most days I can avoid it, but if it’s one of those days where I’m performing brainless tasks like copying and pasting a bunch of data or debugging a script that takes about 5 minutes to run before hitting the bug, I will almost always have something going on in a different window or screen. My problem can be concisely said as: I can’t handle boredom.
My brain is always going. I have to have something playing in my brain at all times. This damn ADHD gets the best of me quite often and I feel like I have to have something going on while I work on other things. Whether it’s a podcast while I drive, a video while I do dishes, or some music while I work, something must be going on outside my brain while I try to focus on something something inside my brain. I know it’s getting especially bad when I instinctively pull out my phone to watch TikTok while I fill up my cup at the fridge or walk up the stairs. I often catch myself trying to finish a video I started in the bathroom while I wash my hands, only to find myself scrolling to the next video (or past the next three) using my nose because my hands are wet.
I’ve tried to stop at least the social media addiction before through things like time limits on my phone, or removing TikTok and other socials for a bit just to give myself a reset. However, I often find myself barreling past my timers, ignoring my downtime limiters, and just scrolling and flipping back and forth just constantly. It gets pretty depressing sometimes.
Finding the cure
I often float around the self-help, philosophical, journaling, and minimalism sides of YouTube in addition to a lot of the gaming and tech related content I get. I’ve seen a wide variety of videos about switching to a dumb phone, be it a high-tech modern dumb phone like those made by Punkt or LightPhone, or a fairly simple, older style flip phone. I’ve even seen a fair share of videos talking about how to set up different iOS and Android launchers to emulate the same experience of a LightPhone, without paying the extra $300+ when i already have a device that does all those things. One of my favorite flavors of these videos is the “dedicated devices” experiences, where the author talks about how life-changing it was to have dedicated things in their bags for each of the needs:
- the iPod for audiophile levels of algorithm-less music listening
- the childhood Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS to play all the retro classics
- the flip phone for calling their friends and loved ones
- the point-and-shoot for odd photos or camcorder for b-roll
- the book, which is not a device, but fills the need for entertainment or education
While I long for this type of lifestyle, I also recognize I am a tinker that loves tech devices that why I ended up with
- a phone that I use to
- write this blog
- read from my books server
- stream music and movies from plex
- emulate retro games
- play modern games from Apple Arcade
- record and produce music (if I were any good)
- an android phone that can
- play android games
- read the same books from that same server
- steam the same music and movies
- emulate the same games
- play modern Android games
- play PICO-8 Games (I should write a Kids Reviews for that..)
- a Nintendo 3DS that can
- play anything for made
- 3DS
- DS
- and most retro consoles
- move files around as an FTP server
- Stream video from the device to a local computer (if only I were a twitch streamer)
- produce music (see prior comment about being no good)
- play anything for made
- A Game Boy Advance so that
- still has the some old save files from Pokémon and legend of Zelda
- And a flash cart that plays all the game boy (original, color, and advance) games I could ever want
- Can also produce music (can you tell I really want to be a musician?)
- A Steam Deck that I’ve used to
- play any modern game from all the game stores
- Emulate pretty much any consoles, retro or recent older gen
- Stream anything from Plex, YouTube, and more
- attempt to read comics
- Stream gameplay to twitch (did that like once, but the option is always open)
- A Linux based gaming device that I sadly lost, but was configured to
- emulate all the retro classics
- play PICO-8 natively, not emulated
- produce music in yet another method
- Sync all my save files so that I could also access in my steam deck
- Play music like an mp3 player, though, frankly the experience sucked
- a Kobo eReader that
- I actually use to read my books and comics
- I modified to connect to a server I have in my home to download and manage my books
- has an alternate reading application installed so that I can download pdfs directly to the device from that server without needing to plug in and sideload those files.
- several computers that I use to
- host applications for my own house
- Host gaming servers for Minecraft, Starbound, and Valheim multiplayer,
- Mess around with different scripts, programming languages, frameworks, textbooks examples
- Write this blog
Basically, instead of having five devices that each do one thing, I have almost 10 devices that I have forced to do as many things as they possibly can.
Why am I like this
Do I recommend this lifestyle? No. Not really. I like doing it because I find it entertaining to say “Check it out! I made this thing talk to this other thing. Why does it need to? Hell if I know, but it can!” Being able to write this blog on my laptop, then proofread and publish an article from my phone gives me a certain satisfaction that I can’t explain. Being being able to send a link to a book to my wife via text message, and her just be able to open it, download it, and start reading without having to look at a file browser is super convenient. But, most of the time, setting up these projects us super convoluted, it’s rarely practical, but I always enjoy the satisfaction from when it works.
Frankly, this is also exactly how I see my job as a software developer. With the difference being that it’s almost always practical because someone has a problem they need solved. I’m never making something do something it wasn’t designed for, because someone designed the language, packages, and framework for exactly those purposes. None the less, I get the same satisfaction of finally hitting the “Run” button of my IDE, and it works perfectly.
Though, this never happens on the first try. In either set of projects. There’s inevitably a troubleshooting process, a debugging phase, a rework and refactoring sprint. But that’s where the learning happens. This of where you do the deep dive through the Reddit posts, the stack overflow threads, the documentation. If it gets bad enough, you go join a free Discord or Slack server to search the conversation history or even ask for help.
It’s been inside me all along
In my attempt to find a background video for work one of these days, I found this guy’s video. First, I came across his video taking about his experience with the bag full of dedicated devices. In it, he mentioned the actual video I linked here, where he talks about how to get your childhood brain back. Go watch it, but it boils down to “let yourself be bored.” You’ll give your brain the space to desire new things other than social media. It gives you the chance to heal from this dopamine fatigue.
The thing I realized that all the examples he gives are exactly what I’m doing with this endless tinkering. But I let myself tinker with things because in the end it teaches me about my job. How to sync SSH keys across my devices, how to find the logs for a specific software. How to parce GitHub issues when things aren’t doing what I expect. How to find when new bugs are introduced because an external api changed their schema. How to use the framework to modify the output. How to write bash scripts to launch the application from the start menu. “Make it work” could probably be the tag line to my LinkedIn profile and also the concise explanation of my hyper-fixations with technology.
I’ve been bored for years, constantly seeking out new things to set up, modify, break, fix, and finally fix and make work in new ways. Jumping back and forth between many different projects all within a short week’s span. This extends to my physical hobbies, like electronics repairs or crochet that come and go with long breaks between. But every activity that I’ve engaged with has been teaching me some new cool thing be it understanding my local computer network to allow computers to talk to each other over the internal network, or understanding the movements of a crochet hook to get a better and more flat granny square. While there are a lot of difficulties associated with ADHD, at least being bored won’t be one of them.
The dark side of being bored
At least for me, where I struggle is letting myself stay bored. I absolutely feel the constant push to be doing something. If not doing something, then definitely listening to something. Maybe more precisely, I’m scared to let my brain wonder.
With the constant stream of thoughts from moment I wake up till the moment I fall asleep, I’m always connecting topics that seem unrelated. Taking this article as a prime example, I started talking about social media and work to then talking about all the gadgets and doodads I have to do all sorts of cool stuff. Now we’re back to ADHD and how it affects my life. The problem with that is that I can easily jump to scary and dark settings without meaning to. As a prime example, the current political climate had me imagining a hypothetical situation in which I went to jail while my wife and out kids fled the country. like… the fuck?
I’m scared of my own thoughts, and I’m terrified to leave myself alone with them. I have a history of depression and suicidal ideation, and it’s never really going to go away. I’ve told my wife that I had never pictured myself as a fully grown adult and definitely didn’t have a vision for myself at this age. I have a vivid imagination where things can get pretty dark pretty quickly. This fear is a large part of why I scroll through TikTok using my nose while washing my hands. Boredom for me can either lead to creation, or it can lead to darkness and depression. So I have to be very careful about what I do to make sure it’s not the latter. Addictive social media apps are great at numbing my brain just enough so that I don’t have to worry about it, but that has other problems.
What’s the point?
I don’t have a good point. I saw a cool video that I wanted to share and talk about. I wanted to call out how ADHD sometimes feels. I wanted to give myself something specific to do so that I don’t actually think about how scared I am of the United States under a dictator who is trying to deport or jail everyone that isn’t white and christian. I’m wanted to participate more on what I’ve been seeing people say about the IndieWeb and AlgorithmFree summers.
At the end of the day, I just want to be more mindful about how I spend my time. I’m still learning how to manage those thoughts and that free time better.
Adendum
After finishing this post, I was watching another Video Essay about algorithms and their place in our consumption of art, media, and influencing how we think about things. She dropped this quote that I really wanted to share. It didn’t really have a place to insert into the main body of the article, but I wanted to toss it inhere because I thought it was super relevant to what we are all feeling right now.
Just because something is a mal-adaptive habit does not make it an addition. I think maybe one of the reasons we all describe ourselves as being addicted to our phones is that it lets us off the hook a little bit. Like, it’s not you in control. It’s this third party: your addiction. This other alien part of you that isn’t the real you. I think admitting that scrolling too much is just a truly bad habit encouraged at every opportunity by corporations with something to sell you, a bad habit that you could break but have to work hard at and would have to actively build alternate habits to. I think that feels harder for people than just throwing up their hands. It requires reclaiming and consistently exerting control over your digital life when that control is often so much easier to outsource.