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Editing journals/2019_02_02.org

* Saturday, 02/02/19
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** 17:04 Selfishness
Reading the Art of Selfishness after jail vounteering while I waited for Emma, I
ended upon the chapter about how tying your life to social relationships too
tightly can lead to the destruction of self, manifested as suicide or other less
dramatic but still significant deleterious effects.

One thing that dawned on me as I was reading it was that the author advocates
unmooring your personal satisfactions from things that you don't have as much,
or any, control over. This rang really true for me, especially as regards work
right now. Often I find myself complaining to Emma or my journal about what a
mess things are at work, but work is the only place right now where I can do
technical things. My hope for satisfaction in tech is intimately tied to whether
work is going well. That sucks. Even worse, it means that I don't have fun with
code or projects.

I have available outlets. There's Open Maine (code for maine by another name),
and Stavros always has fun side projects that could use help. So I think what I
ought to be doing is making time in my life to explore ideas outside of work to
do fun projects and learn best habits. That's how I got where I am anyhow.

In the meantime, save the crappy technical challenges at work for work time, get
through it, but keep an eye out for opportunities to improve things, like
advocating for quarterly project team meetups in person, or writing funny,
accurate engineering specs instead of flailing about with a team that doesn't
know what an engineering spec is.