Without Objective

It's often impossible to motivate myself to build something for myself.

For my day job, it's easy. Delivering impact is the game, and I play it well. I avoid feature-factory teams like the plague, I attach myself to people and personalities who don't know how to manage software expectations, and I blow their socks off as often as I can.

I've built front-end web apps for Cloud and Desktop deployments alike. I've done embedded RF development, interfaced ML with real time operating systems, managed and evangelized DevOps practices like IaC.

I burn myself out a lot.

I have built little to nothing of value for myself.

I think about why occasionally, but it's rare I give myself a truly acceptable and fair answer. Out of all of the reasons - I think the concept that has done the most damage to me over the past 5 years has been the notion of "Gardening" applied to knowledge-based disciplines.

I first encountered the notion of information-wise "Gardening" somewhere after reading How to Take Smart Notes, and after diving headfirst into Zettlekasten construction. These also happened to be the early days of Roam, and eventually Obsidian. I thought surely - given the new community and our individual but shared efforts of organizing and amplifying our power of understanding, at some point I'll have a computer that can help me to organize my projects, tasks, thoughts, rambles and more. I'll finally start finishing projects, I'll finally be productive.

For writing, the system was simple. Write rough verbosely. These are your scraps as I called them - other's called them seeds. Over time, you were suggested to fix up these notes. Separate them based on context like Zettlekasten. Organize links between them, name them. (Cf. evergreen note titles are like APIs.) Over time, this would become an "Evergreen Note". Think of a note or article with the solidity of a Wikipedia Article. (I like this as an example too: https://microservices.io/patterns/data/event-sourcing.html)

The main concept of gardening was - start small, start anywhere, start in any way you can. Over time, prune and trim and water your thoughts and grow them into something bigger and more useful - like you would a garden.

Once I started gardening with real plants I finally understood how much bullshit this philosophy is. At least - how much bullshit the philosophy I came to understand was.

True gardening doesn't take as much energy and dedication as a collection of notes. Gardening can be a lot of work - but for the most part, I'm just doing damage control. I did not create the seeds, nor the soil, nor the sun, nor the systems at play which permit them to grow. I put maybe less than 5 minutes a day into fairly mindless tasks of watering. After the summer, most of these plants are likely to die - and new ones will be planted the following season. Unlike my notes - which I've consistently tried to take with me everywhere.

Most gardens are grown to flower, or to produce fruit. Most trees which are grown, are grown to harvest.

The biggest distinction is that as my collections of plants grows - from a table of saplings to acres of farmland, the amount of work I must commit to grows extremely slowly. Before modern equipment, it was said that a single person could tend a hectare of farmland per year. Now - a single farmhand with the help of combines, tractors, pesticides, and even weed-eating robots can tend to huge farms.

Each note however - requires certain dedicated amounts of energy for it to progress to each new stage of it's useful life.

And - just like code, the more text we produce, the more we must manage ourselves, and the thinner we spread ourselves out.

So why does this matter? Why does this notion impact the work I do not commit to for my own sake?

I reject the demand I implicitly create for myself to do future work.

I don't mean to - and in fact, I didn't understand why I couldn't commit to my own projects for a long time. Part of me, perhaps, wanted to trust that the tools I made for myself were of the highest quality. Part of me knew, they never would be. Part of me also knew - that trying to fix 3 month old code built on a whim in esoteric languages is actually hell.

I've continued to remain silent on the internet - not because I wanted to hide my thoughts or projects, but because I inevitably didn't care to put the time and energy others put into their creative communication. I don't always want to edit my writing, I don't always want to have the perfect post, I don't want to spend all month making my website nice and tidy, and I don't want to manage myself like I am managed at work - committed to an endless stream of pointless tasks to tweak and tune systems that aren't that fun to tune and fiddle with.

So where is this rant heading? My goal for now: commit to fewer goals. Build and act Without Objectives. Create for the purpose of creating, and be more comfortable with putting projects to bed.

The systems I build for myself should be more like true gardens. Ready to die in the soil I planted them in. Waiting for the next season so that their pieces can be cannibalized by another.

Bonus content - Things I Keep Telling Myself

GitHub ain't too bad. I don't mind hosting much of my code there - and I already use it to host my broken website. Each repository can have it's own website even - so why not take advantage of that? Just let the project be - and if you need a webpage then build one otherwise don't sweat it - a README will do just fine.

Bluesky and other public - facing social media platforms are honestly great places to mediate discussions. They're just not utilized well. I constantly dream of a platform that unifying Ted Nelson's concept for Xanadu with Social Networking - but Twitter clones are good enough for now. You don't need a comment system - just send link's to friends as if you are sending letters in days of old.

The task of formatting still sucks. Markdown isn't semantic, semantics in NLP is hard, XML hurts my eyes, and I don't want to care about it any longer.

Large Language Models are here to stay. Everyone has their opinions and ethics and morals are still being built in regards to how these things should be treated/used. Regardless of the result - they are fun to play with and so will likely be here forever. They aren't great for everything - they hallucinate, lie, are shitty writers, plagiarize and more - but sometimes these are strengths. Ask an AI for writing advice - not because it's good, because the recoil you feel in your gut will send you on the path you most agree with anyway. (Like Cunningham's Law - but always put yourself in the position of the adjudicator)

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