This entry will be a little rough and unedited, because sometimes that is what I need. I have a dozen journal entries that have been in the works for months now, and I’ve put them off because I don’t want to publish until they’re each complete, perfectly worded, and aesthetically pleasing.
It’s 1 am where I am and Kaley is already sound asleep. I’m sitting on the couch in the living room typing this. Soon, she might awake and realize that I’m not there beside her. I hope she’ll forgive me for breaking the bedroom homeostasis.
Tonight we attended the Edgar Allen Poe Speakeasy event at the Haile Village Center. It was a long drive all the way across town and I was anxious to go because it’s just been so long since we really interacted with strangers and I had no idea what to expect from the event. It did end up being more of a show than a social mingling event. I wore a new dress shirt I got from Kaley’s father for Christmas, and was very pleased about the fit and feel. The event took just under and hour and a half, and performers read 4 of Poe’s stories during that time. Each story was accompanied by a “Macabre” cocktail.
After the first 2 drinks/stories, I felt good. I don’t make a habit of drinking alcohol, so when I do get it, it’s a welcome escape. For what felt like just a few minutes during the show, I relaxed and forgot about all the stress that plagues me day and night. I really ought to just drink coffee less often, but sometimes alcohol can balance it out and give me a glimpse at what a healthy mental space feels like. Or at least that’s how I figure it.
By the time we were done with all 4 drinks/stories, it was too much alcohol. I was tipsy and Kaley slightly less so. We walked around Haile Village Center, which is fresh because neither of us is familiar with the area whatsoever, for half an hour or so until Kaley felt safe to drive. We grabbed groceries from Publix on the way home.
Once home, I gave Sox, my dog, a late dinner and a walk after so that she could go poop. That was around 8:30 pm. Kaley and I hung out some and I watched her play a bit of Skyrim before we got ready to read a chapter of The Hobbit and go to bed around 10:30.
I still haven’t managed to fall asleep, and all of my problems are coming back to haunt me now that the warm fuzzy cloud has abandoned my brain. I’d like to write down my stressors as a list for your sake, but sadly it’s not that simple.
I try to look at many world problems as symptoms. Cause and effect. Some underlying problem causes another. And then that secondary problem might cause further problems. How do we fix it all? What does fix even mean? What if we’re meant to suffer?
I guess I really should just start by telling you some tangible problems rather than try to drag you into the twisted mess of my mind.
- Right now I’m working hard on a bid for a City of Gainesville software contract. I’ve done a ton of research on starting a business, taxes, relevant government agencies at the city/county/state/federal levels, etc. I filed for an LLC on Sunday and obtained a couple of web domains. I put up a nice website for the LLC already that says what I’m all about. I’ve been researching all the relevant technology standards I need to comprehend in order to complete the contract assuming my bid is successful. I still have well over a month to put my bid together. But I still feel so fucking stressed about it. The way software works, if some other company already has software that has the necessary features, it might be as simple as them waving it in the city’s face and BOOM: they get the contract. Why pay some individual with no contracting track record to build something from scratch when they can get a decent product that’s already built? That train of thought leads me into a more abstract web of problems regarding companies and barriers to entry. If you can’t compete with existing companies, you’re forced to join one of them to put food on the table. That makes the company bigger and more formidable (assuming you are contributing and not asking to be fired), making it even harder for the next person to compete with the company.
- This is related to the first point, but I spent a ton of 2023 searching for software jobs. Writing nice cover letters, tweaking my resume, putting up this personal website. I even tried Upwork for a while. Most companies don’t even bother to send an email saying they looked at and rejected my application, so I was left wondering all the time. There was only one company that actually treated me like a human and matched my effort in the hiring process. I completed a dummy project for them and they gave me feedback for it despite hiring someone else. Their brains didn’t go: “We hired someone, time to move along and completely disregard all the other applicants because messaging them won’t make us money!”
- That brings me to capitalism. Everyone is desperate to make it so they can have a decent quality of life. Because they’re so desperate, it’s easy to justify fucking over other people. All of this just makes me more and more distrustful of other people, and therefore even more isolated. I’m sure other people feel similarly and it’s a self-propagating cycle. Every time something goes poorly in my job search, the FEAR is amplified because I don’t witness a genuine community or culture anywhere I go in my day-to-day. I feel like my CITY (everyone in it collectively) will just fucking throw me to the wolves if I don’t play the game and play it right.
- Now I get to the environment. Listen, I’m a programmer. I have spent years agonizing over trade-offs and being forced to face the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect solution. Adding more features to an application usually makes it more cluttered and less approachable to the people who don’t care about the new features. Writing a ton of verbose low-level code to try and squeeze every drop of performance out of the computer takes a lot of time and makes it harder to understand the code and therefore add features. Etc. Etc. Back to the environment. A lot of people drive cars. Let’s say that every city gets outfitted with a bus system that is perfectly optimized and we save a ton of carbon emissions because everybody starts commuting via bus instead of car. That’s obviously a big stretch but I’m trying to make a point here. If people feel uncomfortable and substantially less happy when riding the buses than they did in cars, that means that we didn’t fix things completely: we TRADED one problem for another.
Therein lies my misery. I want the world to be a happy place where I feel alive and safe, but with just the right amount of discomfort and adventure. That’s a lofty goal. Right now I would just settle for a decent paying job in a field where I have quite a lot of expertise but I can’t even seem to find that because I probably get automatically disqualified by a bunch of HR recruiting software (and humans) because I don’t have a college degree. Yeah, let’s just neglect the fact that I have 8 years of experience at a successful startup and have helped college grads solve problems on numerous occasions.
But can I really blame the recruiters who disqualify candidates because of a single college degree checkmark? What if they have to sift through thousands of applications for each role? WHO CAN I BLAME? Especially when websites like Indeed are probably spammed with applications from automation software.
I CAN’T BLAME ANYBODY. I can’t point to any one person/thing and say: “There! There’s the problem. We can make them stop and everything will be good!”
Here is what I can do. I can be honest and use the power of self-expression. That’s what I’m doing right now. I don’t care how many fucking metrics of happiness and other bullshit various companies are generating. The facts are these:
- I can’t find a $20/hr job in my field after months of searching when I know incompetent programmers who went to FAANG companies and made $50/hr.
- Everybody pays fat taxes and insurance bills for medical care in the U.S. and yet I have to pay $1300 out of pocket whenever I go to UF Health (an esteemed institution) for an hour-long appointment to make sure my aorta isn’t close to bursting because I have a bicuspid heart valve and the root cause of that also causes my aorta walls to be weaker. The paperwork from UF Health tells me that the appointment would’ve been about $4,000 each time without insurance. Wow! I’m getting such a great deal!
- I have to scrutinize online product reviews VERY closely because so many of them are sponsored. It’s hard to find unbiased information in general on the internet. I will never ever work for an advertising company.
- 90% of the blog websites that pop up in search engines are absolutely saturated to the brim with obnoxious ads that absolutely ruin any happiness I may have gotten from reading the person’s blog post. Everyone’s gotta make there money somehow I suppose.
- I want you to think about something real quick. On the topic of blogs and ads, I have seen many blog pages where I can open my browser’s devtools, and the advertising-related images/JavaScript/etc. eat more network bandwidth than the actual blog content I care about. Not only does that disappear my 5GB limit on cellular as I browse the web, but transferring all that shitty ass content over the internet has real energy usage ramifications. There is something that is wastefully killing the environment.
- You would think that AI (machine learning) would be a boon to society. We have a new tool that can do people’s menial jobs for them. In a perfect world, those people would be freed up to do more enjoyable things with their time. Instead, they’re just out of a job so they have to go learn a new skill asap and stress over finances.
- After high school, my social life disappeared completely. I’ve seen many people say the same thing on the internet.
I’m sick and tired of it all. From now on, I will be honest. I will speak my mind. I will relate to other people. We will fix things together. My planet is your planet, your planet is my planet. We all affect each other and it’s pretty difficult to see the butterfly effect our actions have, so I can understand people unintentionally causing a lot of damage. Then other people, like me, grow hateful as a result of being hurt. And so the wheel turns. But if we understand each other deeply, we can stop that wheel. Or at least I have to believe so.
God I’m fried.