Over the last 10 years, I've felt my anxiety growing and growing, to a degree I thought insurmountable. There's a meme that men will do anything but go to therapy and I apparently chose a short jaunt with philosophy as a substitute. That's convenient, though, because the idea of philosophy as therapy is apparently fairly common.

I mentioned in RSI and SICP that I had started reading "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" by Dale Carnegie. That led me to reading "Meditations" and learning about Stoicism, then its counterpart Epicureanism. As my Youtube started recommending me more and more philosophy, I eventually landed in the area of Nihilism and its answers of Existentialism and Absurdism.

I intend for this post to be a commitment that I'll no longer dwell on what my life will amount to, I've found my answer in Absurdism. It will simply amount to nothing, I'm essentially here as a piece of the universe experiencing itself and that's the extent of it. I wanted to write this post, 1. because I feel this has been an especially transformative time for me, but 2. I still find myself occasionally thinking about if I'm doing the right thing, if what I'm doing at this very moment will set me up for success, thus the commitment part.

Anxiety through my ages

I've been struggling with anxiety for a while without really realizing it. I remember constantly in high school and college, before any big speech or presentation I'd have to run to the bathroom and shit myself. So great. Luckily, the biggest stressor was knowing that would happen and worrying it wouldn't happen soon enough; once it was over the actual event felt much more manageable.

Then when I moved to Seattle, my wife suggested I should see someone because I was constantly spacing out instead of following our conversation. She assumed this was ADHD, but the behavioral therapist I saw (oh hey, I did kind of go to therapy a bit) said that a lot of my symptoms sounded much more like anxiety. I started crying as she went over the symptoms. I had a very similar reaction when I saw this goofy ass SNL skit. We're not alone. It felt like such a relief to know what I was dealing with and for the most part I feel like that was all I needed. Now that I knew what the problem was, I felt I could just compensate.

That worked pretty well for a while. Then I started spiraling about our lack of support system in Washington (we had moved out of Seattle to Bellingham at this point). I worried what would happen if I lost my job and we had no family to rely on, if we'd have to pick up and move home anyway to be able to survive in that scenario. So, we ended up moving back to Minnesota, driving with 3 animals across 3 states to get back.

This also helped a lot. It was weird going back after so long with so much changing, it was hard to get back into the groove of things, but we had our immediate family to rely on again. The only problem was I still felt a lot of worry about if I happened to lose my job. I absolutely dreaded the interview process during this time and I feared it as an impossible uphill battle that we'd surely be destitute. So, I did a bunch of things to try to alleviate that anxiety. I made an effort to fix my ergonomics to ensure the health of my hands: I tried a few different ergonomic keyboards, learned to type using Colemak, and now regularly use my standing desk so my hands can drop to my sides. I started using Neovim to try and learn my tools inside out. I've read around 20 textbooks in the past couple years, endless blog posts and talks on the art/craft of software engineering, and I still have a deep backlog to get to. I also started using Rust since I see it as an important part of the future of programming.

After all this, I felt confident in my abilities... I'm at least able to recognize that I've put in a lot of work and I should be proud of it and I should be confident. That helps me be confident in my abilities sometimes. The next thing to do was to try and secure a financial future for my wife-and-I and to get a yard for my dog. This is the only thing I feel I've really "failed" at, but really it just didn't happen as immediately as I hoped. I do think my dog will have a yard some day. I don't know if we'll ever feel secure in our finances. Money is mostly fake anyway, all of it can just disappear so probably best not to put your faith in it protecting you.

Anyway, I tried to secure this financial future in a number of ways. I've done interview prep, I've done leetcode, I've thought about what the hell kind of SaaS I should make or what open source tool I could work on to build a network and get name recognition. Ultimately, I think the prevailing wisdom is that going into something simply for the money is less likely to be successful than something you love doing. Either way, it's not what I want to be doing, it's something I felt I had to do. I'm ready to stop.

Hopefully it's clear that I've repeatedly attempted to tackle what I viewed as the catalysts of my anxiety. Which is where Absurdism comes in.

You can do anything

I like to sum up Absurdism as "You can do anything," but that can be pretty dangerously misconstrued. It's definitely not that you should do anything. But if you wanted to, you certainly can quit your job and go live in a tent in the woods. There may be forces that work against you doing this, such as a desire to live with your family, inside a house, among society, but you definitely could do it. I think another way to put it is "You might be dead tomorrow." This is also reminiscent of "day-tight compartments", essentially why stress about yesterday, it's gone and over. Why stress about tomorrow, you might not even see it. What you do have is today. And when you no longer have today, you have nothing, you are aware of nothing, everything in your past meant nothing because you are not there to give it any sort of purpose at all. Instead you can revel in the revolt of living, your place as the universe experiencing itself.

For me this has led to a much more local change of no longer worrying about my financial future. I'll still certainly work towards my goals, but why stress about them. This has given me the room to consider that I may spend an inordinate amount of time on trying to secure that financial future, such as making a badass SaaS, but never get to enjoy the outcome. So instead I'll do what I want in my free time, I already work to make a living. There's a small hope inside me that the things I am doing in my free time could lead to something more, but it isn't what drives me doing those things.

That's pretty much where I'm at. There's no need to question what I'm doing any further than "Do I enjoy what I'm doing right now?" Whether that be scrolling Reddit or building a little robot.

We can refine that a bit, just because I might be dead tomorrow, I still don't want to be completely shortsighted. Epicureanism and Stoicism offer some ideas for living pragmatically. Epicureanism points at living life seeking happiness, but also recognizes at some points that you should be willing to suffer some pain for the happiness of the future. This has led me to exercising more regularly, for the happiness of my health. I like to think of Stoicism as saying we can't change all around us, sometimes we just have to accept the world and live with it as it is. This has helped me stop stressing about the decisions other people make and to try and adapt to the changes in the world.

This has shaped my philosophical outlook. Now I want to stop thinking about philosophy and just live. That may be impossible. I'm sure I'll want to mention it occasionally and reaffirm it or even use it to describe my motivation for something. But I definitely want it to take a backseat to what I want to focus on.

What are those things? I've decided to take up drawing, I've been learning intently since the beginning of April. I'll have to rework my site a bit so I can have a little gallery. And then also Timewaste, my little game project that's a literal symbol of my Absurdist revolt. And then I just have an interest engaging with culture and the zeitgeist in general.