Fusing too much with Work

This site is going to be a journal on my path to freedom from W2 wagie land. However in the meantime (and until we have our wedding next year), I do have a challenging day job.

This past few weeks I’ve had a difficult problem - basically trying to use Amazon’s S3 as a real time time series database. Whole companies have been founded building this product! But we want to do it for cheap, which means no expensive Databricks contracts!

I’ve been slamming my head into this problem. Don’t want to get into too many of the details, but it’s hard. Hard enough that it’s been affecting my mood, since I’ve been struggling to make it work.

I was lucky enough to be at a party last friday talking with Mark Estafanos. I mentioned that my work was getting to me, I was too invested.

“Yeah dude, just stop taking Adderal.”

I laughed, but it really stuck with me. Mark’s great - people literally pay him to be a life coach. It really was a simple idea.

I’ve been taking concerta for a couple years now - it started since my work was challenging enough I needed the leg up. Being online in the TPOT scene has made me finally admit that although I can cope I’m very much on the ADHD spectrum somewhere. Having a magic drug that made me good at my job was amazing. Like caffeine without the anxiety.

But I have noticed downsides. Since I can understand more than I normally would, I’m more nitpicky - on PR reviews, on the code I write. On concerta I want everything to work perfectly. The real world isn’t that way, the real world is messy.

A couple days later a mutual DM’ed me to let me know he was quitting amphetamines, giving it a try. It feels like the time is right for me, you have to listen to serendipity.

So going to give concerta a break as I zoom out for a bit. Concerta is like a mangifying glass, incredibly useful but sometimes you need to take a step back.