In all the time I’ve used computers I’ve always been making, building and tinkering with stuff. Way back with an Acorn Electron and later a BBC Micro I’d be coding stuff, you know, just for fun. At university I’d be doing my coursework and then all sorts of other, often art based computer projects. At the agency before Flickr I’d be getting up at 5am to work on personal project before grabbing the train to work. While in San Francisco evenings (once the kids were in bed) would be either playing games, going out or hacking around with some new thing. At the Guardian it was the same, work during the day and then hack around with stuff, often on the Guardian API, for fun in the evening and you know, sometimes not.

And then, suddenly it stopped. Opening up the laptop in the evening to throw together two lines of code became too much. The words for a blog post would go racing through my head all day, but the effort needed to sit down that night to write them out was mentally exhausting. This wasn’t just an irritation, it was down right infuriating, I could see myself missing out on interesting things.

buzz

Rev Dan Catt: Leaving the Guardian, creativity vs mild depression, the quantified self and running

I decided not to blog this post when I came across it a few weeks ago out of a general desire to start keeping things a bit more upbeat around here, but I’ve found myself thinking about it and mentioning it to people a lot since then so I think it’s worth entering into my permanent record (aka Tumblr).

I relate pretty powerfully to the phenomenon Dan Catt’s is describing here—in fact, I’ve been there myself a number of times over the years as a result of demoralizing work situations. Like Catt, though, I think the onset has always been so gradual that I’ve been surprisingly slow in each case to recognize my puzzling loss of creative mojo and general excitement about life as a symptom job-related depression, not an inescapable sign of my personal decline. Catt’s observation that social web output is a reliable way of gauging this phenomenon also squares very much with my experience—if you graphed my Twitter activity over time, you could probably pinpoint the moments where I left jobs.

I refuse to miss out on interesting things. Which is perhaps why I am an incorrigible freelancer. The costs of being a slave to a job are just too high.

6 August 2012 40 buzz
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Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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Socialogy

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  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

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  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

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  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

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  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

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