Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on Nov 17, 2019 10:12:35 GMT -5
Compared to Windup bird, it didn't feel quite as personal to me either. I can't say I can feel the gap as well as you do, I'm not even sure which one I liked more. It's hard to compare the two, because despite being from the same writer and having a lot of similarities, I still like them for slightly different reasons. I think that is something that would become more clearer after reading them again.
And those Oregairu news sound great. It doesn't have to be perfect. Of course I'd like it to be as good as possible, but as long as it's not another GoT I'm happy.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 18, 2019 21:06:57 GMT -5
Hm, so I went in to see a specialist about a lifelong medical issue. Quality of life thing, but harmless otherwise.
There's not much out on the market to treat it. 2 medications, one approved 2 years ago with lukewarm effects, and another 2 months ago. The two doctors I saw admitted there was not much out there, and also offered "experimental medications" not approved by the FDA. The doctors were pretty upfront about the fact that there are no empirical studies, and I don't think they were quacks. There's just not a lot in the way of options.
I declined to investigate the non-FDA approved approaches. I've thought a fair amount about it today, and I stand by my position that I will not take non-FDA approved treatment. But it really gives you insight into how people get snookered into medical nonsense.
"Some people have reported improvements"... said by a medical professional. Sounds legit, right? But what is "some people"? What's the failure rate of people who tried it and got nothing out of it? How much of the success is just the placebo effect?
Some people could be a lot... and an authority figure tells you so... so it's easy for someone to accept without questioning, especially if they're desperate (cancer is notorious for quack treatments...). I don't have a stats background, but I do work with stats, and anecdotes are not data.
I'm sure nothing would happen in my case if I took the "alternative treatments." But I'd probably be out some money and some hope. So I'll pass.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Nov 20, 2019 22:25:43 GMT -5
This kinda started as me writing up my thoughts on Kafka after chapter 42, but then just kept on going. So… sorry.
Both Saeki and Nakata are victims of violence, and both represent two ways in which people retreat from it.
For Nakata, that’s to wipe away his past. I don’t know if it’s significant that Nakata’s family is considered a member of the Japanese elite, but consider the following: after the occupation of Japan, several such people claimed to never have supported the old way of thinking. Essentially, they capitulated in every way, kept their head down, and accepted the new world order. But in doing so, they became hollow. Rather than accept a past that happened, they wiped it clean. Perhaps this is what Murakami is getting at with Nakata: he is only half complete because he has no past. He calls himself “empty” because those memories, both good and bad, have been taken from him. A past, as Murakami covers in Wind-Up Bird, is not something that can be escaped.
However Saeki represents the opposite extreme. The moment her lover dies she retreats into the world of memory. Rather than live for the present, she resides entirely in the past. Her life is therefor meaningless. As she confesses, she is simply waiting to die. And why not? She claims she knew she would never be happier in her life than she was at fifteen. She also claims to damage everything she comes into touch with, which may or may not be entirely true. Either way, like Nakata, she is essentially half of an existence.
But something else of note about Saeki is her journal. She claims that the process of writing the record of her life was important, but she requests that it be burned because reading it will only cause people pain. I suspect what Murakami is getting at here is that accepting the past is very important, but being entirely defined by it is not. Japan did horrible things during World War 2, and I suspect he is trying to say that they should not turn away from that fact, but nor should they let it become the defining part of their culture.
Kafka, meanwhile, is representative of the new generation. His father’s “curse” and his “cursed DNA” is symbolic of the violent past of Japan. His attempts to out-run the curse fail (his father still ends up dead), and any attempts to “master” it are like-wise proven to be insignificant (as is shown in the dream where he rapes Sakura). The only way for him to overcome it is to confront the fear and anxiety inside himself.
I mention World War 2 a lot, but it’s difficult to understate what a radical impact that event had on Japanese culture. An entire way of thinking and living had to change within, quite literally, a few months. Children raised to believe the Emperor was a god were now told, “just kidding, he’s not actually a God after all”. The nationalism which was used to justify many of their actions was revealed as a façade. There’s also a lot more going on regarding the history of Asian oppression that I won’t get into, but suffice to say, it’s a topic of major importance. And I think, now that the people who remember the event are entering old age, there’s a genuine fear that the history behind the event will be re-written. To paraphrase from 1984, ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’. There’s a line in Kafka on the Shore in which Hoshino responds, “What are you talking about? The Americans never occupied Japan.” This is, I think, Murakami’s greatest fear: that as WW2 passes from memory to history, it will become re-written in a way which will exonerate the Japanese.
Although I’ve discussed WW2 greatly because of what it represents, the book is clearly not limited to that event. It represents violence as a cycle: one that cannot be broken free of with more violence. Nor can it be escaped from by pretending the past did not occur, nor can it be avoided by clamming up inside memories of ‘happier’ days.
(from this point forward I just started listing my thoughts as I finished each chapter, in a new exercise to see if I can make sense of things that way)
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Kafka cannot enter the forest/realm inside himself until he abandons all the things he carries and faces it as “just flesh”. I think this is a reference to the idea that you cannot face yourself armed with things; you have to do it as your naked, exposed self.
Crow, I believe, is Kafka’s effort to view the world outside himself. To view it ‘objectively’, as it were. I think Murakami is stressing the significance of seeing things beyond just your point of view.
In joining with that, I do not think that Ms. Saeki is Kafka’s mother. For all the potentialities of it, the biggest counter-argument is that Kafka’s mother left with his sister, and Ms. Saeki never once mentions, or is mentioned returning with a daughter. I think her role for Kafka is that she teaches him love. He felt abandoned by his mother, and confesses that he cannot understand why she did not love him. Until the point where he fell in love with Saeki, he never felt love. Later in the woods he imposes Saeki onto his mother and decides (through Crow) that his mother did love him, and that it was anguish for her to leave him behind. In other words, he is able to use his love for Saeki to try and understand what his mother must have felt towards him.
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I find it interesting that, despite being ‘half’ complete, both Saeki and Nakata are able to pass something positive on to the next generation. Saeki gives Kafka love, and Nakata is able to introduce Hoshino to culture, which in turn leads to a kind-of sense of self-worth.
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So here we come to the ideal land in the forest. I’m not going to lie, I’m not 100% sure what to make of it. However, it strikes me as a place that seems idyllic on the surface, but is in-fact quite hollow. The TV only has one channel, and it plays a video that’s ‘mostly harmless’. There’s talk of a library, but no books inside it. The food is good, but there’s no meat. It’s all very, for lack of a better word, ‘sterile’. On being taken there the soldier’s tell Kafka that no harm can come to him while he’s there. My best guess is that the place is a living memory. Obviously it’s connected to the entrance stone in Nakata’s story-line, though I’m not quite sure why it has to be ‘opened’ and ‘closed’. Either way, it seems to follow that this is the kind of place that Saeki would retreat to: somewhere she can no longer be hurt. It also makes sense that Kafka might also want to retreat here too, although he hints that pain is also an anchor into feeling truly alive.
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Ah yes, the “I now regret the decision to alternate P.o.V.s every chapter because character A’s chapter just ended, but character B’s story can’t continue yet, so I guess we’ll just have character B f*ck around a bit because I have nothing else to do”. Been there friendo.
A Boy Named Crow
I can’t say I fully understand this chapter. I still think Crow is the second-person manifestation of Kafka, hence why he can’t find Kafka because Kafka has disappeared into the land of memory (e.g. into himself). I believe this is also why he cannot stop Johnnie Walker, who I don’t think is literally his father, but I think is, like Colonel Sanders, a concept. Sanders calls himself ‘neither God nor Buddah’, while Johnnie Walker calls himself ‘neither good nor evil’. My theory is that Johnnie Walker is the concept of violence, and with Kafka being lost in himself, ‘Crow’ is therefor not up to the task of stopping him.
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Okay, so maybe my earlier idea of ‘memory’ might not be 100%? This place might also be the underworld, just going off of the constant warnings to ‘not look back’ (Izunami/Izanagi reference? Works in more ways than one, actually…). Either way, despite the conversation with Saeki, I’m still convinced that she’s not really his mother. As I said, if she is, where did his sister go? Like-wise, I don’t know whether or not Kafka is literally the reincarnation of her lover. Why does he have that memory? He might not: he might simply be imagining the scene as he saw it in the painting.
What matters, I think, is that whether or not either one is the literal embodiment of what the other is looking for, Kafka is able to forgive his mother (through Saeki), and Saeki is able to be forgiven for ‘abandoning’ the person she loved (through Kafka). Keeping in mind Saeki did not follow her lover to Tokyo, I think it possible that this is the person she was referring to when she talked about abandoning someone.
Maybe I’m just being stubborn, but there’s a recurring theme with Murakami’s protagonists. Most of them are entrapped by isolation, and it’s through connections with others that they are able to escape their predicament. Recall that Toru called upon May Kasahara, who in the end did [something?] to save him. I think Murakami believes strongly that human connection is a type of salvation for people. Hence, I think that although Saeki is not Kafka’s mother and Kafka is not her boyfriend, they can still provide emotionally what the other needs.
There’s also something else going on here that echoes Hoshino’s earlier interactions with the philosophical prostitute. They quote Hegel, and Hegel is beyond me at the moment, so maybe this whole realm business makes more sense if you’ve read Hegel. To my non-Hegel educated ears, what they’re discussing sounds like empathy. Only by putting yourself in someone else’s position can you truly begin to understand them as something different than the ‘other’.
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So much like how Saeki requests that Kafka always remember her (having burned up her own memories), Hoshino declares out loud that a part of Nakata will always live on in him. So just because something is dead and gone doesn’t mean its memory/influence doesn’t continue.
We also see ‘Johnnie Walker’ in a grotesque form, which in-keeping with my ‘violence’ theory is intentional to represent the grotesqueness of violence. It seems telling how Hoshino isn’t able to attack it until the entrance stone is closed. Possibly this is symbolic that, again, violence cannot be stopped with more violence. Only once the entrance stone is closed (a portal or gateway to the heart? Memory? Or something broader?) does it lose its power and wither.
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And at last the final chapter. Mostly a refrain, we see that Kafka is finally done running and ready to face up to everything that’s happened. Once again we discuss the importance of choice and destination, the significance of memory (through Oshima’s dialogue), and finally the significance of human connection. Though he refers to her as ‘sister’, she is obviously not his real sister. But as the book references many times, sometimes what is ‘real’ is not as powerful as what is ‘symbolic/metaphoric’. She need not be his biological sister to provide that role. It also seems to imply, by the fact that their dreams differed, that he did not rape her, thus proving once and for all that he is no longer a pawn of his father’s legacy.
-Closing thoughts-
I won’t say I understand every angle of Kafka on the Shore, but I at least feel like I have a pretty good handle on the core parts of it. I think some aspects would become clearer if I knew more about Shintoism and Hegel, but on the whole I don’t think you have to have that knowledge to understand the gist of the story. Some things I don’t think have meaning unto themselves. Raining fish and leeches, for instance, I do not think are metaphors for anything directly. Like-wise, I don’t think it’s significant that Nakata can talk to cats beyond the mere fact that he can.
But of course I could be wrong. I still don’t fully understand the significance of the sections in bolded print, nor can I say what ‘concept’ Colonel Sanders represents. I also don’t know what the deal is with the philosophical prostitute, nor do I have a firm grasp on exactly what the underworld/realm of memory is. Even the things I do know are subject to revision upon re-reading.
At any rate, I’ve already typed way the flying f*ck too much, so I’m just gonna stop.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on Nov 21, 2019 11:41:06 GMT -5
Now that's a proper wall right there...
After reading Windup bird, I can definitely see some themes like human connection and history/memories being relevant in Murakami's novels. And like you said, it seems like Murakami believes that human connection is a type of salvation. In both novels, there's a lot of things that are either directly referencing historical events, or just elements that can otherwise be explained through historical and cultural influences. It gives an interesting look into a different culture, which is part of what makes those books appealing to me.
A lot of those ideas on what things could mean make sense, especially the crow being a second-person Kafka. When I read it, there were a *lot* of things I was confused about, and some things I had only some vague idea how they should be explained. I thought of the forest-land as being some sort of place where time stands still, which makes it seem like a too 'sterile' place. So basically calling it a 'living memory' sounds accurate to me, as you are stuck in that one moment in time while trying to isolate everything else out of it. It could also be seen as some sort of fantasy-land where you pretend nothing bad has happened and never will, place to escape from the reality, where Saeki spends her time. Now, how it relates to the whole stone thing, I have no clue. Basically most of the things related to Nakata are a mystery to me.
@joey: I could see myself trying out those alternative methods (depending on how crazy they are of course) if I were desperate enough... but I'd have to be really desperate. But that would explain why some even relatively sane people somehow get into weird pseudo-science stuff. Placebo is one hell of a drug though. From what I've read/seen, depending on what's being treated, believing that the treatment will work can have massive effects on the actual efficiency. Then again, there are some people who have completely made-up conditions with real symptoms because they are delusional enoug h (stuff like electricity-allergics, who claims to also be really sensitive to radio signals and can't be in the same room as a computer).
Now that I think about it, having doctors recommend non-approved treatments is a really bad idea. A doctor should always have the authority, and people shouldn't have to question doctor's advice. By offering something that's not universally accepted and well researched you risk ruining the reputation of medical professionals. The moment you have to second guess whether or not the doctor actually knows their stuff, you open the door for "independent research" aka anti-vax.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 21, 2019 23:05:03 GMT -5
Yeah, placebos are a hell of a drug. I was reading about the efficacy rate of the medication I got vs. placebo; it was something to the tune of 35% self-reported improvement vs. 27% or something to that effect. Enough to be statistically significant, but that's an awful lot of people who thought they saw an improvement, but couldn't have. (Also a lot of people who got no benefit?)
I understand why the doctors were recommending non-FDA approved treatments. There just really aren't any options out there, and they were very upfront about the fact in the beginning that they were not approved/did not have official scientific backing. It'd be different if they suggested them to me and did not caveat that. I would have nope'd out of there like nobody's business. I have no tolerance for not treating data and facts like, well, data and facts. Anecdotes do not, in fact, carry the same weight as rigorous data.
Meh. Anyway. Tried the medication. I haven't noticed any difference. I kind of suspected that would be the case, though... I have 4 doses for free, so I guess I will use them and then call it quits, assuming nothing changes.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Nov 22, 2019 0:39:31 GMT -5
I don't think it's wrong for the doctor to bring it up as an option as long as they are honest about it. I think of a doctor as more like a medical guide: they can direct you to certain treatments, but ultimately whether or not you chose those options is up to you. They're just picking out what -they- think is best, like any guide would.
Placebos are weird. If it's a serious condition, then they can be deadly and genuinely awful. But if it's nothing serious, I don't know that I'd mind: as long as I'm feeling better and not contagious, what the hell, right?
My faith in medicine has been damaged so heavily in the past few years. Just as an example, I can take all the anti-allergens in the world and still have a stuffy, runny nose. Honestly last year I discovered that one benadryl before bed (and an Allegra if it's a super bad day) does more for me than anything else. Even then March still sucked royally. Sometimes you just can't fight crappy genetics. (I know it's not the best example, but it's what I'm currently dealing with, so it's on my mind)
If medication doesn't work, there's also the strong possibility that it carries some serious side-effects. I have a friend with bipolar disorder, and he explained once how the medication he takes works. I can't remember the details, but the take-away was that it helps him sleep and keeps him from feeling the need to commit suicide (the attempt of which lead to the diagnosis), but has some pretty serious long-term consequences on the brain. B is better than A, but that doesn't make B all that great...
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 22, 2019 22:05:59 GMT -5
Yeah, psychiatric medications are tricky. I am not sure what your friend takes, but there is an entire class of drugs used for schizophrenia/bipolar disorders that are, for lack of a better term, nasty. They can help with the symptoms, but the side effects can be intolerable for some. There is a reason schizophrenics are notorious for not taking medication regularly--the side effects can be truly terrible (huge weight gain, overwhelming sleepiness, impotence, etc.), and a hallmark of schizophrenia is that you simply don't realize you are ill at all. If you don't think you're ill, why would you take medication, especially medication that makes you feel like sh*t with no perceived benefits?
I don't fault medicine on that, though. We don't really understand how the brain works to begin with, let alone the medications. It's hard to develop fine-tuned medications when you only have a perfunctory grasp on what is driving the disorder, and that means that you might develop a medication that gets rid of symptoms, but also overcorrects in other, unrelated areas, leading to bad side effects. It sucks, but that's just where we are right now; if we could do better, we would.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Nov 23, 2019 3:07:53 GMT -5
It's hard to develop fine-tuned medications when you only have a perfunctory grasp on what is driving the disorder... This is more-or-less what I mean by losing my trust in modern medicine. As a child it seemed like we knew so much about the human body and could cure 90% of the ailments in the world. Over the last few years though, it seems more and more like most modern medicine is mostly just keeping the body alive long enough to fix the problem on its own. Even on the things that we try to fix, our understanding of the way the body reacts to several things is tenuous... and add to that the variety of possible responses and it becomes even more of a mire. While the mind is certainly the largest mystery, every part of the body has intricacies we don't fully grasp.
On an unrelated note, I feel like I'm trapped in a paradox. I like the *idea* of playing a JRPG, but whenever I start actually thinking about committing to it, the very things I'm looking for suddenly turn against me. Basically I want something with a vibrant aesthetic, the exaggerated-yet-likable characters, and character growth. In other words, a good ol' anime JRPG. Problem is, good ol' anime JRPGs come with a lot of good ol' anime BS.
For example: since I got my dad's old TV that won't overscan my PS3 games, I thought that maybe I might give Xillia another run. I haven't played it since it first came out, and I'm curious if it'd even remotely hold up to my current scrutiny. But after loading my old file for testing purposes, I took one step out of town and Elise started screeching about being hungry. As if that wasn't annoying enough, Teepo then followed up with how you have to eat or you'll never grow boobs.
That line pretty much put me off of playing the game.
I know it's just a throwaway line that characters use to remind you to eat food. But the fact that they even feel the need to constantly b*tch about it is annoying. Elize's voice is just grating (why does every single f*cking Tales game insist on having a child party member?) and Teepo's voice is more grating. In fact, Teepo's very presence is a nuisance. And to top it off, you're a doll constantly talking about breasts around a twelve year old girl.
Just... please...
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 24, 2019 11:02:37 GMT -5
Hey, welcome to the reason I don't play JRPGs anymore!
I would enjoy JRPGs so much more if they didn't have that kind of anime nonsense. As it is, the lolis and Teepo and the boobs can just kill an otherwise fine scene.
I've come to the determination I've kind of burnt out on programming and work. It's not that what I am doing right now is burning me out... more that I burnt out super hard over the summer, and I haven't really recovered. I can articulate precisely how and why it happened, as well as specific things that continue to aggravate the sense of burnout, but it'd be a long post.
The question is, even if you know what caused the burnout, how does one recover? I'm guessing maybe the best approach is simply to just... not try? Don't force trying to do something I have no passion for right now, because that will just make the burnout worse. I'm trying that approach now, anyway.
At least I'm sleeping consistently nowadays! f**k insomnia.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Nov 24, 2019 13:46:14 GMT -5
I don't know if you have this luxury, but maybe you can scale back for a bit? I burned myself out editing in Summer because I spent a month editing a part, only to have to go back and re-do the entire thing to fix a massive plot-hole. After spending two months on the exact same sh*t, I was pretty much not only done with that story, but feeling a burn-out on writing as a whole. So I put editing on hold, started working on a new story, and only held myself to 500 words a day. It's been slow going, but over the past two weeks I've felt motivated enough to kick things up a bit. Now I still only hold myself to a -minimum- 500 words, but I try to shoot for ~1200. Considering I have yet to fail, I feel like I'm finally past the burn-out and ready to wrap this novel up.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 24, 2019 18:43:54 GMT -5
I can't scale back on working 40 hours a week, but I can scale back on working outside of working hours. That's normally been a pretty common thing for me, not because I have to, but because I liked to. Past tense being the key word here.
I really haven't written much code over the past few weeks as a result. I feel better doing other things, at least.
Part of me is a bit afraid I won't ever come out of the burnt out funk, though. What would I do? I sort of burned out on video games several years ago for a set of very similar reasons, and my interest in video games has never recovered. Although at least programming isn't as pointless as video games.
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Post by Friendly Person :) on Nov 24, 2019 19:23:53 GMT -5
I don't necessarily think those things are analogous. There's a difference between what you do as a hobby/pass-time and something that gives you a feeling of satisfaction/accomplishment. Part of the reason I don't play video-games anywhere near to the degree I used to is that I don't get much satisfaction from playing them. Used to be finishing a long JRPG felt like an accomplishment. Nowadays even spending a few hours consecutively in a JRPG feels like I could have been more productive with my time. Judging by your post, you're more-or-less in the same boat (rather, you've been in it longer than I have). I might get burned out on writing, but I'll never hit a point where I won't write: the urge just inevitably grows over time.
So I guess what I'm saying is, don't stress it. Do your work, which will keep you involved in programming, I'd suggest using your personal time to just do something else for a while. Unless programing is your only hobby, there are other things you can do to take a break. And it might take time, but I think it's better to take a few months off, but be productive on your "on" months than it is to kill any interest in something because you forced yourself unnecessarily.
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Derman
Oracle Knight
I still don't have a knife tag on my golden birth knife
Posts: 194
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Post by Derman on Nov 25, 2019 6:59:11 GMT -5
Does that mean in few years I too will be unable to tolerate anime bulls**t in my JRPGs? Right now, having some a-bs in a JRPG doesn't immediately ruin it for me, but I'd still rather play the games without it. NieR is a pretty good example of a game that I still like, but it does have way too much anime-BS for my taste.
I think there's a big enough difference between programming and games that you can't directly compare them like that, but I think I can see what you mean by being afraid you won't ever recover. You can't really scale back your full-time job (unless you can start doing something a bit different occasionally), so that means you have to stop doing it in your free time. And at least for me, that is what I enjoyed the most, and while working full-time last summer I realized I didn't want to do much programming related stuff in my free time. It made me think about whether or not choosing this career was really worth it, because I'd rather occasionally do it for myself in my free time than do it full-time for others and get paid for it, if that makes sense. I don't have many things I care about a lot, so having one of the most important ones be ruined because I decided I wanted to make it my job is a bit of a bummer.*
Now that I'm working only a couple of days a week, I've started doing more personal stuff, even more than I used to previously. So yeah, I think taking a break is the best option, but it's really hard when you have to do it 40 hours a week no matter what.
*I'm not saying I hate my job or anything. I still enjoy the things I do at work most of the time. But there are things that make it clear that I don't want to do this (specifically in this company) for too long. And a lot of them are things I'll run into in pretty much every tech-related company, although some might be more tolerable than others. But I'm not going to get into it right now, that's a whole another topic.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 25, 2019 17:44:38 GMT -5
Video games and programming aren't entirely similar, but the reasons for burnout are kind of. In college, I started keeping track of my backlog completed/unfinished progress on backloggery.com. A lot of fun, but it changed the way I played games--gotta check it off the list! don't buy that game unless I'm dedicated to finishing it so my backlog is clean, etc.--and it started becoming an obligation of sorts. Then I had a friend who would make fun of how I'm not all that great at most video games. This is true, objectively speaking, but having someone point out you're not very good all the time makes it harder to have fun. Eventually, I stopped playing games unless it was single-player sandboxes or I had a decent chance of being okay relative to others.
So... a racing check-off-the-box mentality and an obligation to be "good." Not a good combo for having fun.
Programming... was put into a role replacing senior engineers and left to figure out the codebase for myself. I didn't understand what I was looking at, and the weeks ticked by of me producing nothing. Pressure built up to do things quickly. Check the box off. Then came the pressure of shit, I'm spending all this time untangling unique-to-the-product business logic that someone else wrote and not actually developing my programming skills. I need to make up for the lost time in skill development in my own spare time. All coding must be productive. Oh, and I feel incompetent and stupid for not being able to figure out the business logic, so I have to prove to myself I'm not actually an idiot by working on complicated projects.
So... a racing check-off-the-box mentality and an obligation to be "good." Not a good combo for having fun.
The absurd thing is no one has actually told me any of these things or given me feedback that I am not working fast enough or am not progressing fast enough. Everything that burns me out is my own demands of myself.
Whenever you do feel like talking about it, Derman, I'd be curious to know what you don't enjoy about your job and think you'll run into elsewhere? I get what you mean about not wanting to ruin a hobby. I don't want to ruin my hobby of programming, either; I have limited interests, and really enjoy my hobby programming. I don't know how I'd fill up my time if I didn't. Of course, nor am I someone who can do something they're just meh about during the day for a job, so I have a double incentive not to flame out.
In any case, I'm doing more social things lately and punted on doing any work over the weekend. Made me feel better when I picked work back up today than I did on Friday.
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Post by Youngster Joey on Nov 28, 2019 20:28:39 GMT -5
The ever-continuing saga of family get-togethers:
My sister decides to leave earlier than planned because she doesn't enjoy spending time with our family.
My father is pissed she is leaving early and proceeds to be an a**hole the remainder of the night.
Why, it's almost like my sister (and my brother, and me) have some kind of reason for always ditching family gatherings quickly...
I think this is one of my qualifications for any potential relationship--are you a nice person who regularly acts like an a**hole and casts a tense shadow over every family event so no one can enjoy themselves? No thank you.
Maybe other people's family dynamics are also dumb, and potato, pohtato, pick your poison, but still
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