I’ve been feeling bouts of restlessness lately because there’s a lot of things swirling in my mind that I want to do, but I know I have to choose some of them to do now at the expense of the others. I can’t have it all.
An example from Making of Prince of Persia where Jordan Mechner is caught between his desires to make games, make films, and travel the world.
Part of me wants to go deep on my writing passion and make stories and new worlds. I want to channel the same energy as the authors that convince me to turn pages and never stop: the intensity of Charles Yu, the methodical imaginativeness of Ken Liu and Ted Chiang, the emotional range of Min Jin Lee. At the same time, I feel the urge to be a translator of complex topics, to break down the technical and advocate for greater user agency in our relationship with software. I find that writing is often what pushes forward new, provocative ideas; it’s the first attack in challenging the status quo.
Another part of me wants to go deep on playful software. I want to work towards resolving the technology paradox that plagues the technology industry. Software should feel empowering, trusting, and whimsical to those who use it. It should feel participatory like an open whiteboard and understandable like a set of interconnected Legos, not like a black box that makes nonconsensual decisions for you. Fortunately, I think we’re starting to enter a new phase in the industry where a significant portion of workers in the field are adopting a critical mindset of how technology can really be supportive of a healthy way of life. I feel the focus of attention shifting from the best way to make ridiculous amounts of money to figuring out how software fits in our daily lives in the long-term. There is still of course an immense amount of money flowing in the industry, VC firms looking to get a piece of every new note-taking app and crypto collective, but it feels like it has shifted from the gold rush of the dot com boom and the resurgence. Founders are more mission-driven, and communities are forming around imagining a better future. I want to experiment with personal software, to play with making tools more accessible for non-technical people, to create communal and encouraging digital spaces.
Life has a way of forcing you to choose or leaving you behind. We’re here for a limited time, and we can live our lives wavering between commitments or repeating the same thing over and over (living a blank). Or we can make the hard choices and devote our time and focus to one thing at a time, to make the one thing we’re working on right now the most important thing.
The worst thing I could do is waver between the two and not do anything. It may not seem like a big deal for one day, but repetition is a powerful thing. Repeating the wrong thing over and over is a recipe for living a blank scene.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself during quarantine, it’s that I can’t live as a bum. Some people are content to enjoy every moment of life and follow where their heart takes them, and I respect that a lot. I can convince myself to embody this mindset, but it doesn’t feel fulfilling to me at the core. There’s an underlying restlessness that courses through my body and pushes me to action.