Status Update: April 2021

When the spinning stops

There’s something special to when an undesirable feeling goes away.

Imagine that you’ve been in an older car for hours. On a highway, probably. It’s kinda noisy and kinda loud, but most of all - it’s vibrating. Shaking, almost. After a while, you don’t even notice it anymore. It’s just… there, and you’re accustomed to it.

Once you reach your destination and you get out of the car, it goes away. It’s not necessarily a good feeling happening, but the lack of something bad is positively soothing for your entire being.

That’s how I felt after a week in the woods.

Chopping woods and splitting hairs

If I’m to come clean a bit, I wasn’t technically chopping wood - I was splitting it.¹ The trees were already felled, and they were also already cut into smaller pieces with a chainsaw. As a virgin of chainsaws and also a person who’s alone in a fairly remote place - doing chainsawing would’ve been downright irresponsible.

Instead, my best friend was this nifty machine:

Working with it is as simple as it looks:

1. Pick up wood.
2. Place wood.
3. Hold buttons - split wood.
4. Throw split wood into bins.
5. Repeat 2-4 until wood is gone.
6. Goto 1.

And as with many situations - simple is good.

The beauty in the rote and the mechanical

Sometimes something boring and unexciting is exactly what you need. It definitely was for me - for a variety of reasons.

One of the things that has been bothering me the most about working in tech is that nothing ever feels done. I could and should write more about that, but the gist is that I haven’t felt like I’ve actually completed something work-related in… years.

That changed here.

Working with something that has a physical definition of done and a very visual form of progress was so incredibly soothing. (It also helped that once I was done there was literally zero chance of the work done causing a compilation of some other trees to fail because a dependency now had a wrong version, but I digress.)

Doing… nothing.

I put between 3-4 hours a day into the splitting. At the end of the third day, I was done. The rest of the time I stayed at the cottage was blissfully uneventful. When the weekend came, the rest of the family started seeping back, and even though I’d longed to be alone it was a welcome feeling to not be that anymore.

As the weekend ended, I left the woods and went back home to Stockholm. Since I went out on this trip almost immediately after having my last work day, this was the first time I was home after the fact.

I guess there’s a kind of universal experience that happens when something that has been a big part of your life comes to an end. Whether it’s a long term relationship, a big project or event, or even finally retiring after working for so many years - there’s this feeling of nothing that shows up. And it’s ambivalently both good and bad; it’s both a soothing calm and a vast emptiness.

I think the emptiness comes to me because an unfortunate amount of my self worth is tied up in feeling like I do Something Good for the world, which simultaneously is tied up in… work. “If I’m not working, I’m just a lazy worthless waste of space” and similar sentiments and trains of thoughts are sadly fairly common.

Firstly, the biggest and least ceremonial fuck off to any society that instills this subconscious way of thinking in its inhabitants. And secondly, I know rationally that such is not the case, of course. As I said - it’s subconscious, so it just pops up. I’m battling it and I definitely feel that I am winning over those feelings. It’s just sad that I have to at all, you know?

I have a plan on how to not do nothing anymore though;

The next Act

I think about the next step in my life as the next act², and I already know what I want to do.

I want to become a psychologist.

I’m done with computers. Or rather, working with computers. Doing programming on my free time is going to be a hobby of mine for years to come³, but any energy and enthusiasm I had left for doing it professionally is long gone.

Instead, I want to work with people. Help people⁴. Work with the mind. Understand the human condition; how we think; how we heal. I’ve always been fascinated at all of that, and now I want to bring that fascination beyond books and hour-long sessions on Wikipedia.

Unfortunately for me, the admission rates for the psychology programmes are insanely low. Like, less than 1% of all applicants. So, right now I’m studying for Högskoleprovet, since it’s my most reasonable chance of improving my odds⁵. I’m spending my days right now collaborating with a dear friend who is in a similar situation, and I’m just preparing myself for the exam. It’s a quite bit stressful and I have headaches many times when I end studying for the day, but it’s getting there.

What do I hope for in the next update?

Perfect score at Högskoleprovet, obviously. That I feel studying doesn’t induce headaches and stress anymore. And, probably some kind of plan of what I’ll do over the summer - between Högskoleprovet and when studying starts.

Högskoleprovet is on May 8th. I’ll probably do a status update after that. Wish me luck. 💜