The phase of my intellectual development associated with incessant fiddling and reconfiguration of my computing setup, starting with Irssi through to dwm and Musca and culminating in StumpWM, Emacs, Gnus and Org-mode, is coming to a close. It’s happening in the best way possible: Knuth stopped writing his book to write TeX, and I’ve stopped in my work to sort out the electronic tools that make it run better. It’s so very obvious that I have achieved nothing compared to TeX, and in my life will achieve nothing compared with Knuth—and I say it merely to avoid actually comparing myself to Knuth, which would be absurd—but I do feel that I’ve done something analogous, even if I didn’t set aside one project for the other with the deliberateness Knuth did in the case of TeX. But yes, the best way possible in that I’m joyously, if slowly, re-embracing actual important things now. This is not to say that there are not things I want to fix, but they annoy me far less than they used to, and the many many SOMEDAY links to must-have Emacs stuff etc., which I intend to work through over the summer, will likely find themselves archived as often as they are actually pursued. Because I’m there, with a system that is quite good enough and yet so much better than a setup that isn’t personalised.

My joy at all this is that while I kept telling myself “once I’ve done this I’ll get back to interesting things”, I never really believed it—I thought I was just wasting time and avoiding interesting things in fear of them. Well, maybe this is partially true, but actually this transition from this stuff back into more theoretical thought has happened quite naturally. My interests are shifting away. This is not to say at all that I do not take a pleasure in using the system, because that remains, and I still smile when, without thinking, I hit a series of keys and my little finger bounces up and down on the control key and stuff swishes about in useful ways. But I’m finding myself thinking, “why am I still subscribed to the Org-mode listserv? There’s cool stuff, sure, but I’ve got what I need to facilitate the rest and I do not have infinite time.”

So what is left in computing? Well, I have my stabilisation project to switch to CRUX and obsessively document my setup, so I can replicate it without having to re-work stuff, and so that I don’t have to fix things every time I (too infrequently) type sudo clyde -Syyuu --aur. Over time, I will smooth out kinks in how things work that currently require work-arounds; for example, whenever I forward an e-mail I have to cut the message, tab complete the addresses, then paste it back, which is mildly frustrating when I forward e-mails at least once a day. And there’s nothing to suggest that actual interesting projects are going anywhere: I still intend to learn LISP over the summer, write interesting stuff when it occurs to me—this is all separate.

I keep thinking of things to write and it will distress me when I find later how many I have missed. Some more. What’s wonderful about how this has come about is that it’s happened so naturally, as I say, and so how I noticed it was when I started dropping mailing lists, RSS feeds and the like and also when my automatic backup script was doing all my backups, not requiring me to manually check in changes to config files every single day, because they’re sorted. My interest in common fantasy seems to be falling away too. I watch some Minecraft videos on YouTube, and am so so aware that this is just out of a habit and a desire to procrastinate, no longer with the interest I used to have. Have I wasted time over the years playing games etc. and reading so much cheap fantasy in secondary school? Where’s my awe at friends much more deeply invested in such things than me (that is, an awe at their ‘geekhood’ or something)? This is overblown, because I’m excited tonight—I do not pretend that these things have suddenly lost all value for me at all, nor would I want them too. But they’ve been downgraded somehow. And this is most emphatically not “I’m too cool for DnD”. I’m too cool not to play it :D

A few thoughts about Org-mode have come from discussions with my philosophy tutor and in my final session with the university psychotherapist, which perhaps I shall write properly on soon but there’s stuff weaved into this post. My general idea to trust everything to Org-mode and to log everything into it in order to make it real went too far, for different reasons from each of them: tutor thinks that while habits are very important, lists to track them aren’t; therapist pointed out that my memory will only degrade (further) if I don’t use it. I think that my tutor is wrong to think that there is anything wrong with lists when they are used as a temporary help in establishing good habits, but I fully intend to jettison them when I get to that point. As to my memory, I want to slowly whittle Org down to morning and evenings (aside from, of course, extracting information). The idea is that I look at what I need to do and what I have planned to do each day, commit it to memory, then go and do it. In the evening I can reconcile what I’ve done into the system and plan for the next day. This is stuff I do already aside from really trying to commit to memory. I have a place for everything, and it’s all there for me, and that’s great, but one can go too far at this.

One more unexpected thing worth noting is that I’ve spent a lot of time recently clearing out my TODO list of things I’ve meant to do for ages and haven’t done, another thing I would put off my improving on my workflow. I’m doing! Look at me! And I’m doing better thanks to the effort I’ve put in. Most importantly I can be confident that with a few simple habits in the mornings and the evenings my life will remain super-organised with minimal actual effort.

So, what’s replaced this stuff? Getting back into actually thinking again. Therapist suggests, and my discussions with friends at various points lead me to the same thing, that a loss of confidence is the absolute root of this. I’ve got to figure out how to get confidence from stable sources not the temporary ones I’ve relied upon, and that’s very difficult. I suspect that the flaws I have that make me unpleasant to be around at times stem from this stuff as well—when I have a little more figured out, perhaps I’ll write about it. This lack of thinking is what has me adding things to lists and not actually reading them or watching them, a kind of super-procrastination. The only way to get my confidence back in philosophy is to do and read philosophy, and lots of it, and to stop worrying about my own ability being hampered and being behind fellow students. I’m not massively behind at all, just a bit, and this is exacerbated by lack of confidence. I sometimes think: everyone else is getting internships at law firms (lawyers) and city firms (mathematicians) and here I am not worrying about my future and expecting it to be handed to me, well, the thing I should be doing is my subject and so much of it because that is what matters to me. Part of my acute issues with work are to do with this abdication of the responsibility to actually think; I reckon it stops me reading properly and limits my essays, and makes me put things off. I’m not at my potential, but I can be, though it will take time and many more frustrating library-hours before I’m there. My liking and respect for analytic philosophy steadily rises as I actually get into it. I can do it. I’ll be no Bernard Williams, but hey, that’s not really a problem.

People keep telling me I look well this term; this is weird. Apparently I have gained some weight and am not super-thin anymore, too. I now have a almost-ideal-and-will-be-ideal-after-summer-projects-and-fixes computing setup that allows me to get a huge amount done, but I know more about when to stop. I am slowly directing and focusing my passion for philosophy into something energetic, lively and joyful once more. I have started running. I am understanding more and more how distraction works, how focus works and what parts of the modern world one is best to withdraw from in order to protect the latter. There are days when the frustration of the library gets me down, when my tendency to worry shackles me, and when these two combined mean I just don’t do the work I should. But in general things are, I guess, looking up. I am not going to apologise for getting this excited “about a few computer programs”, but I am going to add that they are just computer programs, and a lot of what is going on here is an increasing understanding and awareness of what matters to me and how that relates to my day-to-day temperament. The excitement I feel now is quite different to that I have expressed in posts when I first figured out Org-mode, Gnus and friends. Feeling like you’re on a journey to figure stuff out about something as mundane as time management looks very silly from the outside; I appreciate that, but press that I’m still feeling like I’m on an intellectual journey, which is important.

I have massive intellectual and probably emotional issues that I am working on. In the mean time I worked on other things, and they helped a lot more than I expected, when I cynically thought that I was only hiding the issue. And they made it seem a lot more plausible that I’ll sort out the bigger stuff.