NOTE: This is a personal article about personal
problems and has no academic value

Web effects

I don’t know if you, dear reader, know this feeling: After hours of doom-scrolling your favorite social media you wake up out of trance and realize that you haven’t achieved anything that these people you are watching already have. Worse still you have wasted productive time - time others have spend way better - on nothing.

In these moments I can feel the world rush by me, feel opportunities lost and life wasted. It’s not a particularly pleasant feeling as you may imagine.

How did we get here?

As with any personal crisis it’s too easy to just sit down and give up. But this doesn’t help here, especially given that wasted potential is exactly what triggers the condition in the first place.

For me this mental state is strongest when consuming YouTube content of (mostly) single-person run channels about technology or even any hobby I am mildly attached to. After a few hours of seeing what others manage there is always that comparison. Raw talent and competency against weeks without energy, months without any finished projects, no presentable results all year.

I haven’t published any projects to GitHub, not made a single video. It’s for a lack of trying. The advice of “just do it” doesn’t get me from my chair. And i know that if i just started much would work but I just cant bring myself to do it, interest gone after 5 minutes. And that sucks.

The only reason you read this drivel is because of a particularly strong phase of that effect and forcing myself to write about it.

Common Advice

In regards to what to do here only one thing is certain: I have no clue. Flat out. If I were as productive as any normal person you wouldn’t read this blog entry. I can tell you about my reaction to common advice though:

• “Just do it” - Just get up you lazy bum and do the thing. Easily the most common advice I get. And then my brain just goes into avoidance tactics. I wish it didn’t.
• “If you really cared you’d …" - Second most common advice and this one just achieves the opposite because I do want to do so much, organize my life… but because basically everything has the same emotional importance of “[meh]” nothing happens.

Motivation

On the topic of emotional importance: by “[meh]” I mean that basically everything is baseline. Emotional null value. I don’t have strong emotions as is and any deviations will quickly level out again. Positive events usually take less than 15 minutes to decay while negative ones take longer. I just cannot bring myself to give a fuck (excuse the strong language) about - well - anything.

The only factors that reliably get me into working mode is extreme stress, external force or the realistic expectation of being publicly mocked if the task fails. It is the avoidance of negative reactions that drives most everything I do because i don’t do happy. Good is just the absence of bad.

Social media

Coming back from that trauma dump let’s get back to the actual reason for this article. The triggers for feeling inadequate are well known to the academic community at large. It’s known that prolonged exposure to just the best of the pile is not good for your mental health. So why do people do it?

For me it’s just a side-effect of having nothing to do. Those that have low energy (or like me probably just pretend to have none) seek high-stimulation low effort ways of acquiring dopamine.

For me that is watching science educators and technical YouTube videos because then doing nothing at least doesn’t feel like so much like a life wasted. In the moment it’s just “learning about new cool things relevant to my studies” even though i have never done Android security or Bugbounty or higher math or whatever it is this time.

Do something.

They say the only way to get good at things is to do it. And that is generally true. Wasting a lifetime on social media is not getting better it is tricking the dopamine system into giving up just enough of the stuff to not feel like the world is collapsing, just enough to be comfortably numb.

If you were so foolish as to value your life almost exclusively by the effect it has on others and the Global system at large the only valid metics are amount of output and performance of output. So why then are these tow metics so extremely low even though they form the backbone of the entire valuation I use for myself? That, dear reader, is one of the core questions that keeps me up at night, keeps me having semi-regular mental breakdowns. Because the answer is “I don’t know”. Some working hypotheses include laziness, personal failure and inability to organize.

The problem with doing things is that if the world is already 1000 steps ahead and running, everything is [meh] anyways and you can’t find external reasons that force you into doing them then nothing happens. Why bother expending the energy for fleeting blips that instantly decay while risking failure, the only thing that is to be avoided at all costs or hidden and burred and minimized.

Breakdown management

Okay so let’s say you can relate to this rambling. First of all I’m sorry and second: When a breakdown inevitably hits what do you do?

If the thing starts slowly i go to the park. I never go to the park except for sports because there is no reason to. but sometimes it pulls me there just to sit and think. mostly in circles about nothing. Realizing nothing ever changes sitting around it’s going home time. If that doesn’t help (it never does) I thank the Linux gods that 150% over-amplification exists, pull the music up to unhealthy levels and just lie on the floor crying. As a guideline as long as you can hear yourself think it’s not loud enough. After 3 or so minutes ears start hurting and the realization sets in: This looks dumb, nothing was gained, time was wasted (again).

The sooner you realize that breaking down helps no one the sooner you can kick yourself to just not. Get up and continue as if nothing happened. Because no one cares and nothing ever changes.

Nothing ever changes

In the 2 years I have contentiously noticed this pattern my experience has been the same. This behavior changes nothing. It fixes nothing. It just doesn’t work. It happens because brains are bad computers. They just don’t behave logically and it’s those bugs that make us human but also that make us nonfunctional. I can recall that one of the repeated questions i had for the internet in middle school - one that i obviously never found satisfying solutions to - was “how do i stop being emotional”. Yet many years later the same broken system is still broken.

Conclusion

I’ve managed to become functional over the years, I buried most things deep enough now and for my current education I luckily have strict deadlines on projects that force me to care but it’s still difficult outside of these structures. My personality is still extremely variable based on context like what clothes I am wearing, who is with me or at what location. It’s scary to see but it’s just a consequence of not being deeply invested in anything except a few core interests and skills. If i find any stable paths I’ll update this article but for now all i can say is good luck to all of you.