Fighting the need to analyze

I spend all day thinking analytically at my job. I think
"What's the best way to do things?"
"How are we supposed to do it?".
"Are we doing it the right way?"
"What category of problem is this?"

All day long is spent judging ideas , methods , techniques, etc.

Sometimes I like to relax. I really like to snap myself out of it. It's hard though as this mode of thinking has become somewhat of a habit that carries over into my non working hours. So I go play MMORPGs and refuse to use the analytical part of my brain. I refuse to go "Meta". For instance I never say things like

"This game is so much like a bruce sterling novel"
"I am so overwhelmed at all this"
"I wonder how they designed all this"
"Do you think this is a java message based architecture that they used to implemenet this?"
"a/s/l"

Instead I say things like

"Hi"
"Nice avatar"'
"Let's go on a walk"
"How do I use this game object?"
"Is this your house?"
"How do I play this game?"
"I Like psy trance music"

It's such a nice change of pace but it takes discipline and one needs to be in an environment like an MMORPG to really have that level of innocence.

More worldly stuff over here

I've got a new blog about my other hobby, the big credit bubble and global trade and economic transformation. I will still post to this blog about more mundane things however.

The lives of boring people

Somebody should write a book documenting the lives of boring people. This would be hard to do because REALLY boring people tend to be unmotivated and lazy. You might put an audio recording camera on a necklace around their neck that they would wear all the time.

I'm sure you'd see a lot of:

TV watching

Sleeping

Commuting

Eating

Lots of little failures

Lots of laziness

Talking about uninteresting personal matters (kind of like this blog)

Having repetitive discussions about boring interests such as sports, low-brow political discourse, what to do with one's IRA.

Obsessions with celebrities, collectibles, psychics, etc



It would be good then to compare their lives with the day to day lives of interesting and highly successful people.

RANT- Another lousy week

I had another lame week at work. Everything is so make or break for us.

It seems that no matter how well we do we're always just skating near the edge.

Where is the promised land? Why do I feel angry about it all when I go home at night? Sometimes I feel like an ant stuck in a porcelain cup, unable to climb the sides.

(Shrugs shoulders, Puts nose back to the grindstone.)

Sometimes I feel like the guy trapped on the Island in the 1850s sailor story I posted earlier. Like I have a hard time believing I'm going to get where I'm going but I can't think of an altenative to the current course.

Making quality that lasts.

The most important kinds of things I do in my job are not meeting deadlines. What's a lot better than that is focusing on the deadline for a given feature set. Then an idea for a feature or improvement will come along that will turn the capability of the project from decent to excellent. That's when I put in that extra 25% in that ties up all the loose ends and makes the feature set so good that I never have to go back to the project. Reaching that kind of perfection is hard and it's often annoying because it takes longer than normal, but in the end it often pays for itself many times over.

The embarrassment of change

I changed my hair around lately, and it was a pretty big change. My old hairstyle was "different". My new one is much more conventional. Every person I meet, even if they haven't seen me for 2 or 3 years is saying, "Wow! You cut your hair! Looks so much more sophisticated!" This is kind of embarrassing to me. I think this was the reason I didn't cut my hair for a while. I was scared of all the attention I would get and having to repeatedly explain why I did it, etc.

Of course me being embarrassed by all this is stupid. I guess it's because I knew that my hair was previously sub-optimal, and I had a big psychological investment in that I had had it that way for so long. There is a lot of that going around and I guess there always has been. I think it's part of being human but I am going to try and be more aware of it from now on.

Being successful ?

Sometimes when things go really well a problem arises for me. I think ok, now that things are going well I should be done with my struggling, right? Yet I'm not because even though I've got a few more toys everything is still the same and I have different problems, like maintaining my winning streak. I can be happy or sad with or without "success". It's really confusing, especially with all the cultural influence and what not that says sucess is supposed to be the end all, be all. I guess success is something, but it's not everything. Maybe that's what drives wealthy people to put themselves through all kinds of needless torture and risk in say, climbing Mt. Everest. I think the important point is to be involved in something you enjoy with hope for the future.