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

Sanity, Solitude And The Death Rattle of Productivity

These are strange times. Someone once tried to apply Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to pro­duce some­thing to the effect of “work to be done expands to fill the time avail­able to do it.” Conversely, I’m exper­i­en­cing some­thing of the oppos­ite, a sad fail­ure of self-discipline where amount of free time and apathy toward work and study are set up in a tra­gic correlation.

I’ve been liv­ing on my own for the last ten days, since my flat­mate decided to sojourn to London for two weeks to — of all things — have his knee recon­struc­ted, so I’ve had free reign over my wak­ing hours at a time when assign­ments are pil­ing up, all des­per­ately vying for my atten­tion. My response has been a weak one: I’ve worked one day in the last four, and that was today. A los­ing battle against worry-induced insom­nia has meant that a typ­ical night con­sists of lay­ing awake until two or three in the morn­ing before fall­ing into fit­ful sleep and being com­pletely unable to get out of bed before eleven or twelve, leav­ing a dif­fi­cult sal­vage oper­a­tion to extract any use­ful value from the day. But today I did get some work done, albeit with a near-constant intake of cof­fee in an effort to keep my ragged brain turn­ing over.

Interesting trends are emer­ging. The begin­ning of this [aca­demic] year saw, on the prompt­ing of my flat­mate, my adop­tion of a fit­ness regime involving two or three gym vis­its a week — reas­on­ably heavy car­dio and lots of weights. This has paid off hugely, and I’m now in bet­ter shape than ever. I’ve man­aged to keep up the routine in his absence, but curi­ously the gym has now morphed from a bene­fi­cial yet unat­tract­ive chore into an escape from the drudgery of real work. My doc­tor would prob­ably call this a good thing; my final year pro­ject super­visor would prob­ably take a dif­fer­ent view. When I can’t be bothered to work I hit the sta­tion­ary bike and the bench; I’ve been four times in the last seven days, and I’ve enjoyed it — my usual smug­ness toward the salad dodgers tempered by the guilty pang of know­ing that while I star­ted going there to shape up, I now go out of a desire to put off what actu­ally needs to be done — and I feel good about it.

Fortunately the dear boy will be back in three days, and I’m par­tic­u­larly glad that I ditched the idea of liv­ing on my own when I was plan­ning things out last year. Although things are cool­ing off after a week, hav­ing the place to myself has meant a warm indul­gence of my crazi­ness: shout­ing at the TV, drink­ing beer in the bath, expos­ing myself to res­id­ents of the flats across the street, throw­ing eggs at scream­ing drunks crawl­ing past our build­ing at 4am. Were my flat­mate not here from time to time to give the leash an occa­sional tweak, this place would prob­ably look like an Andy Warhol redec­or­a­tion of a strip club bathroom.

Almost cer­tainly the work enthu­si­asm will perk up in the com­ing weeks. It bet­ter had, any­way. Curiously with the com­ing of my final year, the sense of resig­na­tion to large work­loads we enjoyed in our first year is increas­ingly replaced with a sense of injustice, ver­ging on loath­ing toward the lec­tur­ers set­ting these assign­ments — par­tic­u­larly con­fined to the Computer Science depart­ment. One mod­ule in par­tic­u­lar this year has been a dis­or­gan­ised, mis­man­aged joke, and being asked to pucker up and pinch out a colossal essay hav­ing wasted many an after­noon sit­ting through that bol­locks does grate a little to say the least. But enough gib­ber­ing about that — I’ve got work to do.