Practices

This isn’t going to be a post about how adopting a several-thousand-year-old practice can make you a better servant of capital. Instead, let’s talk about when I feel the lowest of the low. It comes after spending any number of hours on my computer, maybe even a full day, endlessly circling around different websites in search of stimulation, the quick jolt that comes with learning an interesting fact or watching a funny short video or seeing someone get dunked on for having a bad political opinion. I’ll eventually wake into a state that could be identified as conscious thought, look back on the many (genuinely exciting!) things I wanted to learn or do that day, and contrast it with what I actually did. What did I actually do? I honestly don’t even know. I doubt I could list even three things I’d read or experienced the entire preceding eight hours. At this moment I feel very bad. I know one of the ~30,000 days in my life is gone. And I didn’t get anything out of it. Actually, I’m worse off, because spending your time in this way just begets even more time spent in this way.

The headlines don’t lie. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a whole host of other tech companies have announced employees will be working from home until early-mid 2021. There are reasons to believe this will be pushed back; even if the staggeringly ambitious timelines for vaccine development are met, a vaccine might not be a silver bullet and the pandemic could require management for the next 2-3 years. As a software engineer in big tech’s orbit, this means it’s time to settle in for the long haul and take my home work setup seriously.