I've been sick of a flu-like thing for nearly 2 months now (Perhaps COVID, perhaps my burned-out immune system). But I've been sick of life for a much longer period of time, more than I can remember. The problem is not with life itself, but my relationship with it. Not with anyone, not with anything, just with my Control.lens of reality, or more precisely, how I create my reality.
Since I was a kid, I've been creative, curious, expressive. But the universe is a joke of itself, I was raised in a way where these affinities would be punished rather than rewarded. This narrative continued throughout school, high school, college, and only stopped externally when I joined the awesome, life changing, company I work at The Agile Monkeys, eight years ago.
Still, that narrative was already too ingrained in my subconscious mind, patterns were established, habits developed, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. All in a read-only mode, like the program in a ROM memory, or Reader myself life if you wish.
I could go for hours what the narrative is about, but to summarize: self-dismissal, dependent on external validation, overanalysis of all situations, perfectionism, and rejection sensitivity.
This led me to live my life in a perpetual state of fear of fucking everything up, paranoia over analyzing all of my steps, myself, my relations, or even my work, living in perpetual burnout, and anger due to the suffering with no apparent reason.
My mind kept looking for issues everywhere. Maybe I'm using the wrong programming language? Maybe I'm not fast enough typing, so I need to learn Vim? Maybe I'm too disorganized so I need to learn GTD? Maybe I need to make better notes so I have to learn Zettelkasten? Maybe... Maybe... Maybe...
Taking perspective
“The work of a mage is hard, because they have to conquer the most difficult enemy: their own mind.”
The reality is that I have completed “the game” that the society and family imposed on me, relying on my sole hard work and appropriate connections with who I bonded with just by being myself. (If you're wondering, no, my family didn't help me at all, they don't even know what I do for a living).
I had a car, a degree, my own apartment, an awesome job, and a lovely partner, by the age of 24. And my mind just dismissed that.
I’m not saying this to brag. On the opposite, sometimes I ask "At what cost?". Everyone has their own times and rhythm, and I just speed-ran mine.
Building the Identity monad
During all these years, I've been building an Identity of some sorts. I've been focusing on selling myself, on pleasing both people (like friends, family, professors) and entities (like companies who could hire me, Meetup groups, communities).
Nick is a good guy, Nick is a TDD enthusiast, Nick likes Vim, Nick likes Emacs, Nick writes Clojure, Nick evangelizes clean code, Nick is a Haskeller, Nick is a backend developer.
This mountain kept growing, I kept doing stuff to add to it. To keep thinking that while I was growing intellectual skills, and I kept pleasing people, I'd be growing as a person, and eventually I'd be more happy. Yet, again my most cherished moments where some kind of technical stuff was involved was when I spent time with coworkers and conference attendees, just being myself.
No matter how much time I spent reading papers, reading books, watching tutorials, creating projects (most of them unpublished), I didn't feel better.
I was becoming more tired, more fed up with life. I didn't want to discuss, suggest. I started becoming less creative, less curious, less expressive. Memory leaks due to lazy evaluations were at their peaks. And the ROM memory finally worked on full throttle.
I lost all my passions. Even my biggest one: Programming.
The joy of coding, of creating something out of nothing, of playing a puzzle with data, of designing flows of invisible things that then would result in something tangible. The joy, it was all gone.
Although exercise, meditation, and food kept my nose floating for a while, the reality is that I was slowly drowning, and life was becoming greyer and greyer.
I had one swing of hope, one idea that channeled my frustration with life and with the tech industry:
NeoHaskell
Not so long ago, I took all the plans and sketches of a project that I've been working in my mind for years and decided to make it public as a blog post.
The post mentions "a beacon of joy", because that's what I needed it to be, something that rekindled my joy, and luckily the joy of others who, like me, got their joy stolen.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, which keeps me hopeful of the project. But my mind hinged on the bad one.
My logical, reasonable mind did get that it's normal, and that haters were an indicator of success. But my emotional, ROM memory mind dismissed everything else.
You might be thinking that I'm a special snowflake and just too sensitive, and you are right... in the perfect place to read this: "Fuck you! :-)"
I took some time to distance myself from the project, the feedback, the community. Yet when I wrote a single line of code it hurt like never before. What was happening to me?
My lens of NeoHaskell greyed out too. I felt destroyed, why was this meaning so much for me? Why was it so important for me?
I looked around, and everything I once loved was grey since long ago.
Everything just... withered... There was no joy in anything in life, everything seamed meaningless, worthless, useless.
My perfectionism, self-dismissal, paranoia and everything else ate up my identity.
Or did they?
Unfoldl'ing my identity
At this point I realized that my identity as I knew it was an illusion. My identity were my co-traits (see what I did there? – category theory joke) in disguise.
What is my real identity?
What is real?
What is reality?
I still don't have answers for these questions, but if I had to answer:
- Reality is what a subject experiments as the mix of the physical and psychical world.
- Something is considered real if a subject or a group of subjects experiment similar realities around a concept, making it real for them only.
- Therefore, my real identity was pretty much fucked up because there’s absolutely no consensus between what others think of me and what I think of my self.
Or is it?
Many hinge on labels to get their sense of identity: “cat parent”, “gamer”, “Python developer”. And it's completely fine if it works for you (unless you identify as a Python developer, please choose a different language).
We could say that your identity is the stories you tell yourself and the rest of the world.
But what happens if the story stops working? With “gamer” it’s fine, but what about a career? Or perhaps a misdiagnosed condition? Or a change in spiritual path? Or maybe you kissed a girl and you liked it because her lips tasted like cherry popsicle and it felt so wrong it felt so right?
Regardless of it's magnitude, you'd have an existential crisis each time one of these stories crumbles.
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
Do we even need an identity based on external labels? Can’t we just be ourselves and let our identity be the story of our life?
I’m a developer, I do everything to people like me, I made NeoHaskell, I’m an AI engineer, I’m a Haskeller, I have 99% of the symptoms of ADHD, I have anxiety, I have symptoms of severe depression, I’m fearful, I’m paranoid, I’m a perfectionist, I’m a husband, I’m a kimchi lover, I’m Spanish, I was born in Russia, I was raised in the Canary Islands, I’m a minimalist, I’m a skateboarder, I’m a yerba mate drinker, I'm a VR enjoyer. I'm a music producer. I'm Nick.
I refuse to identify myself with all of that.
Those statements are all true, yet they are a consequence of who I am, not the definition of who I am.
My not False |> identity
I’m a shapeshifter, I’m a creative, I’m a thrill-seeker, I’m a helper, I’m a maker, I’m a doer, and an undoer, I’m a speaker, and a listener, I’m a perpetual student and an eternal teacher, I’m both order and chaos, I’m the most capable entity in the universe, universe itself (and so are you), yet incapable to see and be conscious about it.
I am Azathoth, the blind fool, parent of all the strongest entities in the universe, creator of cosmos, eater of worlds. Blind enough to comprehend and understand it's own emotions and actions.
Our reality is composed of stories we tell ourselves and the ones others tell us.
This is the first time in my entire life that I sit down and write something good about myself.
I invite you to do the same. Write some cool stories about yourself, make yourself grand in your own schema of life, value yourself, and value everything that happened to you until this point. Play #thegame23. Journal about perfect days, even if the events didn't happen. These stories are not fake or a lie, they just didn't happen yet.
Where does NeoHaskell end in all of this?
No idea. I don't have plans of abandoning it. But also no plans of continuing it for now, fnord.
For now, I have the biggest programming project of my life in front of me. And that's reprogramming myself, reprogramming my lens of reality, start valuing what I do, and let my inner chaos go out and fill the world with my own existence, being myself, for no one else. Just for myself.
I owe this to me and my inner kid who figured out the best way to live life and accomplish everything that we've accomplished. He needs to rest now, he needs therapy, he needs to hear and feel new stories, and he needs to come out as art expressions, as this entire post.
Beauty is in the Lens.view of the beholder
Everyone agrees that Eldritch gods are horrendous abominations, ugly and a manifestation of everything wrong in life.
But how can we judge the beauty of an 100-dimensional creature, if our human eyes are only able to see in 3-dimensions?
We all are complex creatures, with points of view and perspectives that even is hard for ourselves as that creature itself to understand.
No one can judge us, not even ourselves.
It's a see you later alligator, not a good bye my lover
I wish you double of what you wish me.
Life is hard, don't let it and other fuckwits steal happiness from you. Don't be polite, fuck them all. It's your life, you are a great person. You are polite because you're being overly empathetic, a sign of your greatness and purity of heart. You don't deserve the passive-aggression, they don't deserve your politeness. Fuck them.
I want to create connections, share our art, experiences, our burdens. We are not alone in this world. If you wanna talk, you can contact me via prayer, telekinesis, occult rituals, or code offerings. (I'm an eldritch god now, remember?)
Although it is probably more effective via Twitter (latterly X), Discord, GitHub, or whatever digital mean you find. I'll try to leave a trail of chaos to aid you.
ta-ta,
Signed: The Blind Idiot,
Nuclear Chaos,
Daemon Sultan,
Abyssal Idiot,
Lord of All,
Him in the Gulf,
The Deep Dark,
The Cold One,
Sleeping Chaos,
Blind Dreamer,
King-of-All,
Primordial Demiurge.
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