Work, Life, and Consumption
My First Hurdle⌗
About a month ago, by my estimation, I began work on a personal mission of mine. My objective was – and still is – to make a Crazy Eights style card game for my friends and I to play. I wanted to play cards with my friends over the internet, and I (conceptually) knew how to go about making the software for that, but I found it rather difficult to actually start.
This is a common problem of mine. I think up things that I could do – things that I have an intense interest in doing – and then I never start, or start too late and someone beats me to it. Failure to launch, as I sometimes refer to it, is always a pain to look at in hindsight. See, when I have an idea for a project, it tends to dominate my thoughts. I spend countless hours awake at night, mulling over what it could be like if I just built this thing, or configured that thing correctly. The image of the final product is rendered almost to perfection, and need only be wrought of my hand. Yet, irrationally, the physical, actual first step towards making my thoughts into reality is almost never taken.
Instead of making something cool, instead of doing something I can be proud of, I find myself wasting time. It used to be YouTube, Reddit, maybe a bit of Netflix. I used to waste hours on all three, and sometimes still do, but my interest has faded. Now it’s videogames: Rainbow Six, Gunfire Reborn, Battlebit. More broadly, I appear to have a habit of consumption. Irrationally, and to my own defecit, I trade my time for the constant stimulation of a digital battleground.
What strikes me, though, is that I rarely find video games to be as entertaining as sitting down and working with software. I love writing code. It’s like a puzzle that I make for myself as I try to turn my vague ideas into concrete procedures – it’s a real challenge that offers a real reward. As I’ll get to explaining later on, I recently spent almost three weeks working on my latest project, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Every line written, every bug squashed – it filled me with satisfaction.
Why, then, am I wasting my time like I do? Better yet, what was different last time? Is this something that I can replicate consistently, or am I doomed to live without ever scoring reality with my thoughts?
Making the Jump⌗
Miraculously, I was able to put finger to key and begin process of creating ono!, my card game. I’ve thought long and hard about how I did this – after all, I’m often told that the hardest thing to do is to start.
At first, I had assumed that breaking my inertia was a product of boredom. There exists a mountain of articles in a variety of publications touting boredom as the driving force behind creation. None of these publications are particularly scientific, but nevertheless, I found their assertions plausible. Indeed, I had grown bored of the videogames that I’d regularly played when I should have been doing other things. While I would play them with my friends, as my own way of “being social” (more on this in a later post), I no longer found joy too much enjoyment in playing by myself.
Unfortunately, I can’t say for certain that boredom is what propelled me into action. In fact, prior to beginning work on ono!, I had begun to entertain myself with books. There was a period a few days prior to my starting, I believe, where I had sat down at my desk and read for four consecutive hours, gone to eat, and then came back to read until two in the morning (By the way, Steven Brust is an excellent storyteller). Perhaps I might be wrong and boredom may have been a component of my ability to start work, or maybe reading put me in a different frame of mind, but I still cannot say exactly what conditions lead me to begin.
The Second Hurdle⌗
As I have alluded to, ono! still isn’t complete. Right now, I have what amounts to a very functional prototype in need of polish. The first thing I wanted to pretty up was the main menu – I had mistakenly assumed that it would be an undemanding task. It has been almost a week since I’ve opened Godot and made any changes to the project. Though I know exactly what I want to do, I find myself unable to open Blender, try to grow my skillset, and follow through.
My reading on this mode of failure – not being able to finish a started project – has been less extensive. I’d always assumed that if I could start on a decently-sized project, I’d be able to see it through to the end. Once more, I can’t really put my finger on why I’m not working on it right now. Perhaps writing about not working is easier than trying to figure out how to make a loopable animation in Blender.
I am still interested in the project, which sets me apart from most of the scenarios I’ve read about. Despite nearly seven days of dormancy, I still hold on to the idea of finishing that which I’ve started. Maybe I’m being naive, but then again, it would be really nice to be able to play some cards with my friends without having to take a ten minute drive. So, where is my time going, and what can I do to set myself up for a finish?