Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Everything is Wrong

I’m exhausted, for one thing. But I must leave off sleep for at least another hour because I have to get this down, because for the last two weeks I’ve been put­ting off get­ting things down until tomor­row, and by that time my men­tal equi­lib­rium has read­jus­ted and I can’t think to write any more.

Time is fly­ing. This has both pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive side-effects; I’m not yet sure which is in the major­ity. When you work a 9-to-5-centric job, or 8.30−6 as it is in my case, even at only three days a week, time dis­torts, you never seem to be get­ting enough sleep, and your days off become slightly dis­ap­point­ing pre­ludes to going back to work.

The only pos­it­ive thing I can think of right now is that fly­ing time brings pay­day around with increas­ing speed, but you unfor­tu­nately still have to work in the meantime.

I just fin­ished hav­ing din­ner with former school friends — what was going to be our usual meet­ing of three became nine, some of whom I hadn’t seen for more than a year. And now after­ward, I’m feel­ing shock­ingly jux­ta­posed. It was a great even­ing — the talk was end­less and fas­cin­at­ing; I was talk­ing twice as fast as usual in a sub­con­scious effort to get everything out, everything that has been nig­gling me this year. All but three of us have been at Uni this year, and des­pite being thrown to the four winds we’ve come back and found that we’ve seen the same things, and now being back are feel­ing the same slightly dis­pos­sessed feel­ings that return­ing home and look­ing back over the year brings. We’ve lived the dream, and now we’re stuck in our ninetofives wait­ing for the next roller­coaster to begin. Having been noth­ing short of Free Radicals for a year, even the most rou­tin­ized of us are hav­ing trouble get­ting used to the lather-rinse-repeat cycles of reg­u­lar, reg­u­lar, reg­u­lar work.

I spoke of get­ting halfway through the first term before the shock­ing real­iz­a­tion hit me that we were out there, that in every sense we had Gone Big, gradu­ated into some­thing else entirely. We all went to the same small school, and, it tran­spired, all found the same thing — that sud­denly here we were so far away from all that, and while not shock­ing in a dra­matic sense, it was unset­tling in a way — curi­ous that we’d made it this far without quite noticing.

In a way, shar­ing our tales and find­ing so much com­mon ground again, it was as if we’d all gone off to the same Uni, lived it all together and come back. I guess ulti­mately things go along sim­ilar lines wherever you are, just with a local spin.

So it was with a sud­den and des­per­ate sad­ness that I stepped into the car — for everything I’ve lost, and for everything I’ve gained. In times like these, the dis­tinc­tion gets some­what blurred. Reminiscing on the past, we all sud­denly felt much older — a product, per­haps, of our speed soci­ety, as we looked with nos­tal­gia on things only a few years ago, that some­how seem so dated. But I was encour­aged to note that in look­ing to next year with equal curi­ous­ity and appre­hen­sion, I am not alone. And I don’t think I ever will be.