So begins a new year, and I suppose another one of those blog posts where I muse on updating regularly here. It seems that I am actually not that great at maintaining a blog, at least regularly… and I regularly promise that I will remedy this!
Indeed, I wondered what was causing me not to be posting here, and in my life away from work everything began recently to go into a similar status. It seemed everything was “stuck”: in some sort of holding pattern. I had found a small, comfy hole and had nestled in it, and part of me felt happy and content, but another part of me wanted to move on. I actually keep two redundancy letters around to remind me that if I don’t seek out change, it will seek out me whether I like it or not. A sort of memento mori, as it were.
What’s gotten “stuck”? Well, I had a few ambitions for last year that I kept on holding off on for various reasons:
- Make another game from scratch in C++
- Write a blog post about making games from scratch
- Teach myself more Golang
- Enter the Edinburgh marathon (well, one of the events…)
- Start posting once a week here to try and build the blog
It’s become obvious to me though, that when faced with a “comfy” situation, like most animals, I’ll just curl up and nap (or veg out in front of the PS4 or Netflix, the human equivalent). That’s not to say that I didn’t get stuff done – I learned a lot about AWS at my job, became better at mentoring others, dabbled a bit with Rust and Golang to the extent that I have a reasonable grasp of at least how they work and you do simplistic things with them… the year did not go unwasted. But on the other hand, I didn’t have the big feeling of progress I wanted.
2019 is definitely a year for change – the UK is going to go through with Brexit in March (assuming that there are no last minute twists in the tale). I’m not going to editorialise about that here as many moons ago I deleted all my moany student Lib Dem postings and reoriented this towards tech and movies… but yet the fact that change is in the air probably means that I should think about getting “unstuck” as it were. And a New Year (Jewish or secular!) is always a good opportunity to review how we are.
The thing here is how to motivate myself to start blogging more often. When the writing bug gets me, I enjoy it. I enjoy writing about tech and movies and other things, and every time I think about this blog and then get distracted by something it annoys me intensely. I also have rules such as no hand-wringing politics as it just annoys me and adds to the pile of inane political comment that stalks the net, but also I like writing concrete things (this musing about being “stuck” aside). I should start a personal trello, or just a word document of things that animate me enough to get writing.
Indeed, the worst thing I’ve noticed about being “stuck” is not being “stuck” itself, but rather the constant nagging feeling that gets me down. “I really should do this” causes guilt, which causes more thinking and procrastination, which causes more guilt and… it becomes self feeding.
So for 2019, less consideration and more action is the key, I think. After all, to write about this shit ya gotta do it…
The Answer's 42 