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New Year, New Blog, New Me

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I know, I know…

I’ve kicked this blog off with a post, featuring perhaps the most trite title ever conceived. It was partially due to me not being able to come up with anything better, but I’ll also use as an excuse, the fact that it does a pretty decent job of summing up how I feel regarding myself and my life at this moment in time.

2023

I experienced more personal transformation and growth in 2023 than in any other year of my life that I can remember. I’m sure that raising a child has accellerated the rates of growth and transformation I perceive myself as experiencing. Even if that is the case, there were so many facets and dimensions of my life that went through extreme and rapid change in the past year that it is hard to touch on all of them in a single post, much less keep them all in my head. Instead I’m going to focus on a few areas of life where I experienced dramatic and impactful change.

Spirituality

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

— C.S. Lewis

Before I dive into the spiritual growth I experienced last year, I feel it is necessary to provide some historical context. I didn’t grow up openly claiming to be an athiest but I definitely didn’t consider myself a theist either. I tended to waffle between athiesm and agnosoticism, and when the words God or religion came up, it generally evoked a reaction of contempt or an eyeroll from me. It didn’t matter if I was talking to a Christian about the Bible, or a hippie about crystals. If a claim couldn’t be proven by material science or didn’t have some expert’s opinion backing it, I was generally hesitant to believe it. I was also more than ready to judge anyone who did.

This all changed a couple of years ago, shortly before my son Hayes was born in July, 2022. I can’t say there was a single moment or happening which resulted in me finding God. It was more of a slow and steady unravelling of my mind, eventually resulting in what I can best describe as ego death. It was also probably the most uncomfortable experience I have ever gone through, and probably the one I needed to go through the most.

There are many profound thinkers and philosphers who have described, in much more eloquent words than I can muster, what this process is like. One thing is for certain - the quote I shared above from C.S. Lewis should be heeded by anyone who wants to avoid this experience. Once I humbled my ego and opened up my mind enough to entertain the idea that I might have everything wrong, it seemed as if the universe was happy to oblige me and show me just how incorrect I was.

After the birth of my son, life got busy again and it wasn’t long before the experience of that summer felt far and distant. Even though what I had experienced was reality-shattering and in some ways I was still reeling from it, I didn’t have the time, energy or option to let it become the focus of my attention. As my son has grown older and become a bit more independent, I’ve found myself with more time to read about and engage with topics and ideas I was previously too busy to.

In 2023 I read more books, listened to more podcasts and watched more videos about spirituality, the occult sciences and esotericism than any other subjects. These topics of course are a natural bridge to others like philosphy (particularly metaphysics), mythology, history, archaeology and others. My mind did quite a bit of exploring and there were more than a world-rocking discoveries along the way. There were also a few traps, some of which I temporarily fell into and others which I was able to successfully identify and navigate around.

I don’t think I’ve learned as much about anything (besdies maybe programming) as I have in the past year, about myself, the world, and my place in it. I’ll follow up with blog posts about my spiritual journey that are more specific and detailed, but I’ll wrap this section of the post up with a list of changes in myself I’ve observed, that I attribute to my spiritual growth in the past year.

  • I cut down my alcohol consumption markedly and it’s not nearly as attractive of a vice as it used to be. This could just be me aging, however when the temptation did arise, I didn’t find myself fighting an internal battle over whether or not a drink was a good idea in that moment. Instead, the threat of derailment to my spiritual progress was generally enough to convince me it was not.

  • I was able to cut out distractions such as social media, news, television, and arguing with strangers and or bots on the internet.

  • I was able to do a much better job of avoiding placing expectations on people and experiences and instead, accepting them for who and what they were.

  • Stoicism became much easier to practice and put on display. Many fears, including the most weighty, evaporated.

  • My thinking became more positive and less selfish. I definitely still have moments, but they are increasingly rare.

  • I found myself at peace internally, and experienced feelings of completeness, more than at any other time in my life I’m able to remember.

  • My relationships with family and loved ones have deepened and strengthened and I’ve reconnected with and maintained regular contact with family members I hadn’t spoken to in years.

Programming

I didn’t think the day would ever come, but it did. I don’t remember what day it was specifically, but I know it was sometime in October of last year. After almost eight years of writing code in the Nim programming language and being an active member of the community, I decided it was time to part ways. I have many fond memories from my involvement with the community as well as from using the language as a medium for creative expression and fun.

This probably doesn’t sound that monumental to anyone reading this, however if you know me personally you know how much I’ve droned on about Nim over the years and how much time I’ve spent building project after project with the language. I would often go out of my way to make excuses to code something in Nim when it would have been much easier to do in another language. I also spent way too much time hanging out in Nim’s discord server conversing with other community members.

Over the past few years, Nim’s community spaces as well as the community itself have changed dramatically. A new moderation team was formed and I departed from my role as a moderator. One of the core developers who had been around longer than myself also parted ways with the project. Some of these changes I viewed as positive but in totality they weren’t the change I was hoping to see for the language or community.

I increasingly found myself at odds with the new moderation team and newer community members. Most seemed to be quite a bit younger than me - in their early twenties or early thirties so that might have had something to do with it. Most seemed to also posess an extremely left-brained modality of perceiving reality and often discussions in #off-topic that ventured into mysticism, speculation, or conspiracy were met with derision.

It increasingly felt like a place where the only accpetable topics were Nim and any subject that you agreed with the moderators on. Practicing open mindedness or even agreeing to disagree seemed to have both gone out the window with the changes, and it became difficult to even refer to as a community.

I hope that Nim enjoys lots of future success and maybe one day I will pick the language back up, but for now I’ve decided it’s time for me to switch things up. I’ll provide more detail regarding the languages I’ve been using in my latest project, further along in this post.

Family

It’s quite the obvious statement to make, that my family has grown over the past year. After all, my wife and I are both older and my son keeps effortlessly breaking weight and height records for his age. My wife and I are also expecting and she is due in August of this year, but the baby will most likely be delivered in late July out of an abundance of caution.

So yes, our family grew in size and is still doing so, but that’s not really the point. Having a kid is life altering to say the least, and there are no guarantees of much in life, but especially not when it comes to raising children. There were many trials and tribulations that we experienced in 2023 which could have easily resulted in us growing in the opposite direction which we have. I’m extremely grateful events transpired the way they have.

My wife Christina is my rock and I know factually that I wouldn’t be who I am today if it were not for her love and grace. I also know that she’s extremely special, soely based on the fact that she puts up with my antics. Raising our son together was definitely my highlight of 2023, and every day I appreciate her and fall more deeply in love with her.

My son is now eighteen months old and is the light of my life. He’s smart, funny, caring, loving, patient and a handsome little guy. He amazes as well as inspires me daily. Every moment I’m able to spend with him feels priceless and getting to be his father is the most precious gift I’ve ever been given.

Hopefully the post’s title seems a bit more inoccuous now.

2024

Career

Welp, it happened. I feel like it was fate and I know I was very fortunate over the past two decades, but I was laid off earlier this month. I have only been laid off once previously, and that was before I had a family, was working in game development, and living in Finland.

This time around, the consequences are much more real. I have a child to provide for and another on the way. Thankfully, we’re not in any debt and have some savings to hopefully get us through this period of uncertainty. Having said all of that, this time around being laid off feels different for other reasons.

The topic of AI, and more specifically large language models (LLM), was impossible to ignore in 2023, even if you wanted to. Discounting all of the conjecture about whether our new AI overlords are going to end humanity or not, people seem to fall into one of two camps regarding AI and work. Either they’re terrified AI is coming for their job or they are extremely excited about the prospect of leveraging it to increase their productivity.

I’ll start with the second camp - it’s just batshit crazy to me. If a person runs their own business, I can understand potential excitement around this new technological advent. Individual contributors or managers getting excited about this stuff though? It boggles my mind. I don’t think anyone is going to pay me more because I’m getting more done via some AI. Historically, when I’ve outperformed expectations at work, I’m just handed more work, not compensated more. I’ve never been credited much leess compensated for any of the ideas I’ve offered up that have turned into products or features. I’m lucky if I get the compensation that was agreed to upon being hired most of the time. I simply cannot fathom how anyone is excited about being a more efficient worker.

Now, onto the other camp - the one that is terrified that AI is coming for their job. In an ideal world, where people were more concerned with improving one another’s well being versus chasing the next dollar, I would love for AI to take my job. It would mean that whatever net benefit my work was providing to humanity could be arrived at by a non-sentient being. We could essentially have endless free capital. This could allow all of us to spend more time with our families and loved ones and focus more of our energy on creative pursuits and lifting one another up.

Unfortunately, we don’t presently inhabit a world like that. There’s an abundance of evidence that the corporations and governments that hold the proverbial reins controlling how AI is leveraged and developed, do not have our best interests at heart. There’s another unexplored angle here though regarding AI taking all of our jobs…

The older I get, the less convinced I become that science and technology alone, offer any real solutions to problems we face as a species. We’re slowly rediscovering facts about our reality and universe that our ancient ancestors understood. The symbols and allegories they used to express that understanding have gone unseen and unheard. Meanwhile our collective ego and hubris prevent us from lending any creedence to ancient scripture, mythology or occult science that might lead us to solutions for problems we face.

Most of the tech world seems to be stuck in this imbalanced left-brained worldview and it makees the world we inhabit feel extremely cold, logical, and brutal. If we need AI to come take all of our jobs so that we realize that our jos, work, and meterialism were never supposed to be our focus, I say let it happen.

In the meantime I will be searching for a new gig (apparently at the same time a large portion of the tech world is doing the same) and focusing on my personal projects. I have no clue what the universe has in store for me or if my next job will even involve programming, but regardless I’m excited for the future and what it has in store for me.

Voodoo

The last matter I wanted to touch on in this blog post is what I’ve been working on in my spare time. Anyone who knows me well knows I almost always have some side project I’m working on. Most of the time they don’t amount to anything gother than stars on Github so this time around I am doing my best to create something others can enjoy or at least play around with easily.

Thus, my new project voodoo. Right now it’s not much - I’m able to author scripts in Janet and call various C APIs that the library exposes to draw debug shapes and control an orbit camera. I’ve also added a fiber-based job system, virtual file system and asset management system to the project. I’m currently working toward being able to render animated skeletal meshes. As soon as I have that feature in place, I plan to host a live version of the project and write a lengthier blog post about the project and my plans for it.

The future

I intend to post to this blog as regularly as time allows, especially while I am looking for work. I also plan to add some additional features to it and fix some features that are currently not functioning correctly, like tags.

The posts will vary in subject but will generally stick with the themes contained within this post. I will most likely also delve into some other topics such as astrophotography and music, but I will try to keep the content fairly consistent.

Fin

If you’ve read this far, thank you from the bottom of my heart! I promise to do my best to improve the quality of my writing as well as these posts. As I garner more experience in maintaining this blog, that will hopefully come to fruition.

Until then, I wish you happiness, peace and love.