Theoretically, I’m all onboard with the night shower arguments. I’d love to be a night shower person. But I don’t think I’m physically capable of waking up in the morning without the shower routine.

I revisit Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind every few years when I wanna get my guts all twisted into knots.

I think when Kaufman is left on his own he’s too much of a bummer and Gondry on his own is just too far out. But somehow they come together in a perfect balance with Jim Carey in perhaps his best serious role, IMHO. The soundtrack really takes it the extra mile.

I appreciate it because Joel and Clementine come off as just two kinda fucked up people having a kinda fucked up relationship; very relatable. Neither is perfect or completely at fault and the film very much leaves it up to your interpretation if they can or should work together. I don’t think it has a happy ending, do you? Compare that to something like 500 Days of Summer where you’re really supposed to sympathize with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character but mostly I end up wanting to push him into the mud. Hard.

The subplot between the doctor and his secretary is maybe a little unnecessary? But Kirsten Dunst is amazing so whatever.

I wish I had stayed.

OK, I apologize. That first post was overly negative so allow me to offer some real hope and advice. (I was sitting in the middle of class when I typed that up and needed to get it off my chest. I moved to a new country and started uni again, which is maybe not the best way to deal with burnout. It’s helped in some ways but hurt in others. That’s my problems though, a story for another time.)

Let’s go back to the fire metaphor for burnout, I think it’s more apt. Not necessarily through any fault of your own, that fire is burnt out now. Someone careless came along and doused it in gasoline until it flared up and dissipated. That first fire was built out of the kindling of you, not intentional but incidental over a lifetime as you slowly piled things onto it. This new fire you need to build is going to have to be more intentional. You’re going to have to pay attention, put thought and care into it. That’s going to take practice and possibly several failures first until you get the hang of it, don’t give up.

This new fire won’t be the same. Not in composition or how it burns; that’s just life. It’s OK if you need to take some time to mourn that, I think it’s only natural. But just like a forest fire sweeping through it leaves fertile ground for new things to grow again. Time and patience which sucks because it runs counter to a lot of what we’re dealing with, but just know it as a fact.

For something concrete to begin with, focus on your self and your interests. It’s hard to sit down and focus on just reading a book when you feel like there are so many dozens of other things you need to tend to, but just take that time for yourself. Speaking personally, if you’re anything like me you got some part of yourself wrapped up in that job/career even though you didn’t want to, even though you didn’t ever see yourself as that kind of person. You need to fill that back in with yourself and if that takes the form of books, or comics, or movies, or videogames, or bike rides or whatever silly thing it is that makes you happy, you just need to do it. Trust me, this is important.

Keep going, you got this.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long while. I like to use the analogy of RAM because I’m a nerd.

When I was younger I felt like I had 32GB. I couldn’t even fully load it, I was into so many things I’d stuff it full and still be running at half capacity.

As I got older, more processes began to run long. Taxes, relationships, the tedium upkeep of life. Then work takes a big bite. You have the space so you run it. 24GB, 24/7. And they run it hard.

But then it gets burnt out. It’s just … fried. You can’t load things into it anymore, they don’t hold. Your memory or attention or energy or some combination of all three fail and the task fails. You had 4x8 but now you’re running on 1x8. For everything. The life tasks build and then there’s more: all the services, the nags, the endless notifications on endless apps, a million group chats buzzing by and the ever growing fascism.

But it’s not RAM. You can’t just go to the store and buy new stuff and replace it. You can’t just take a week off and relax and expect that it’ll start working again. It’s … unclear what will make it work again. Is it just broken now, forever???

You try to load stuff into it anyways, because you have to. Hobbies you used to enjoy. But the memory is still no good so it gets corrupted. That thing you used to enjoy now feels like an obligation and trying to engage with it feels like the memory of touching a hot stove. It slips away. And the entire social group you built around that interest? That slips away, too. It’s all too hot to touch, you don’t have the room and it feels bad: it’s tiring and draining and too much for you anymore.

I used to think burnout was a check engine light. I’d notice it go on, I’d recognize it happened, then I’d get to the shop and fix it. It took me years to figure out what was wrong and I still don’t know what to do about it. And the work just isn’t designed to let you deal with this stuff.

Enshittification, as always, is the word here. It’s important to point out because to disenshittify(?) the product would need to turn back the wheel, including profits. Line go down.

With all the other lines going down, they literally cannot course correct here in any way that would matter to the consumer to rebuild trust. So much of their model is built off of force feeding users and directing their behaviors, the thing they absolutely hate.

There was a crow that hung around the parking lot of my old apartment a lot. I saw him every day and started offering food for him. He used to follow me jumping from tree to tree and would often call out for my attention if I didn’t notice him at first. I won’t claim to have really understood him, but you spend enough time around crows and you can kind of start to tell what they sound like when they talk to each other, when they’re talking about you (or nearby humans in general), or when they’re trying to talk to you.

Eventually I taught him which patio was mine and he’d come up to the balcony railing and eat treats. One day I noticed him there just chilling with his girlfriend, which was kind of weird. You can’t really tell crows apart well unless they’re sitting next to each other but he was big and fat like an American football and she was sleeker like a fighter jet. He eventually left and she hung around for another hour or so, very strange.

Well, next day they show up with their new fledglings. He proceeded to pick up the crackers I had left out for him, dunk them in the nearby bird bath to soften them up, then feed them to his kids. And yes, it was him doing the feeding. I think he was just showing me off to his girlfriend like, “It’s cool, I know this one. It’s safe here.”

https://youtube.com/shorts/ilKrUOOEUwU

Just for context I’m asexual and that probably colors my answer in some interesting ways, but I say … just a little?

Less is more when it comes to sex and violence. That might be my most old person opinion yet, but it doesn’t come from a place of prudishness or judgment. I just think once the taboo on that stuff was largely broken it became overwhelming. It’s a flashy hook to draw you in with no substance and they just hammer that dopamine switch so hard that it loses any impact after awhile.

Additionally, especially when it comes to sex, I feel like a lot of times it’s hard to appeal to everyone in satisfying ways. Sex and our relationship with it is deeply personal, the things that appeal to one person might not appeal to another. We’re often left disappointed when the net is cast too wide and feels impersonal, or it tries to appeal in ways we’re not interested, or (IMHO worst of all) comes off as a flimsily disguised exposure to the creator’s unique fetishes. Fine if you’re into that, but very offputting if you’re not.

I was just reminiscing the other day on the experience of growing up as a teen in the 90’s finding some fan translated PC-98 visual novels. You’d play for hours just on the hopes of glancing a single, pixelated boob and end up enraptured in some cyber punk story.

I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong here, I don’t expect everyone to cater to my toned-down sensibilities, but I do think there has to be a happier medium where the sex and violence have real meaning and impact again and aren’t just manipulative marketing. I think that’s a lot of what worked well for (at least early seasons of) Game of Thrones. The possibility lurked around every corner, tension in every scene, and when it hit it landed with titillating impact instead of just drowning you in it.

I have this working theory that the cloud to butt extension was the beginning of the downfall.

It was the point where the techies began to see the absurdity of the “just jam X into it” trend of technology development and got so frustrated at it they developed a childish (affectionate) extension to vent their disgust. Came out around 2013ish or so?

And over the past ~decade and a half, have we not seen that born out to the extreme? It’s around the time I felt myself start to get cynical and stop following tech news.

I agree. The problem is complex and layered, I don’t claim to fully understand it myself, but the problem is that innovation came to mean “innovation on creating capital” and not “innovation on serving the customer”. If you haven’t read Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shosana Zuboff, I highly recommend it. It lays a lot of the groundwork for what Cory Doctorow would go on to call enshittification.

On top of that, or maybe underneath it, is the idea of disruption. It has long been joked as “ignoring regulations” which has very much become true. When you can’t exploit the current systems you create parallel systems where you are in control of the playing field. Disruption to innovation, innovation to disruption. To the consumer it’s just disruption.

What we’ve ended up with as a result over the past decade and a half or so is a market that is not beholden to the consumer at all. We’ve long known that boycotts are fairly ineffective aside from some occasional groundswell on “culture war” issues, but it doesn’t feel like we’re the market anymore. Look at Nvidia’s recent presentation at the CES which wasn’t even about consumers at all, it was about AI and datacenters mostly. They fully dictate the market at us now and we’re just along for the ride.

BUT to my hopefulness above, there are still a few ways to break free of this, I don’t believe things are so bad as that yet. There does seem to be a real choking point for the consumer, Microsoft is another good example. They continue to leverage their market position but people are rapidly exploring options away from them wherever possible. I don’t think we’ll ever truly see a “year of the Linux desktop” the way some people expect, but the slow erosion is real. Another article I think about a lot is the breaching the trust thermocline which theorizes that customer trust is not a linear system. Executives like to believe that once things begin to sour they can simply make a change to correct course when the course was already lost some time ago.

Call me optimistic, but I truly believe there’s going to be such a tech boom once the market outside the US is insightful enough to look backwards and point their finger at the things that worked well and that people actually wanted and iterate off that instead of this failed path, dead end.

Oh yes, I think Peter Watts is a great author. He’s very good at tackling high concept ideas while also keeping it fun and interesting. Blindsight has a vampire in it in case there wasn’t already enough going on for you 😁

Unrelated to the topic at hand, I also highly recommend Starfish by him. It was the first novel of his I read. A dark, psychological thriller about a bunch of misfits working a deep sea geothermal power plant and how they cope (or don’t) with the situation at hand.

Blindsight mentioned!

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

This has been my biggest problem with it. It places a cognitive load on me that wasn’t there before, having to cut through the noise.