At the end of 2018 I wrote a post called What Do You Want? where I detailed achieving a goal I focused almost solely on for five years, and how that left me feeling… well, just feeling. Lots of feels. And ultimately I wasn’t sure what to do next other than keep going.
Since then it seems life was happy to keep me preoccupied with other things. New projects and challenges at work, a country in turmoil, a long distance relationship, adopting a cute senior pup, a global pandemic, and the loss of my father. And so I went, goal-less, for the past few years; just riding with the currents of life and unsure where exactly I wanted to go.
Honestly, while this was a departure from how I normally operate, it was kind of freeing to not have the yearly summit where I harshly analyze my progress and work diligently on course corrections. If ever there was a time to give myself grace, it would seem 2019 and 2020 were it. Now emerging from both the chaos and unstructured years, I do find myself slowly returning to things I once held dear.
I have always been an active learner, but it has grown more passive over time. I have generally felt over the years that work has left little bandwidth to want to program and experiment outside of it, yet I am seemingly happy to watch any number of Youtube videos on business, programming, and the like. Putting in more effort than that seemed a challenging ask even though all of the years I spent programming before work were chock full of experiments.
The same is true for gaming. It used to be that if I was not at work or school then I would normally be playing games. And yet, for some reason, even that had become a challenging ask. Challenging to the point where even the thought of playing some games gave me anxiety. I turned myself invisible on Steam and on the Blizzard client, and my game libraries collected dust.
Looking back I think this is enitrely due to life events and not changing interests on my part. It turns out the middle years are messy even without a wife and kids. Careers, buying houses, aging parents, and paying more attention to the country and local community start to take up time and mind share in a way they don’t when you are young.
Some of these stressful situations finally resolving seem to have introduced a light at the end of the current tunnel. Now I have a bunch of things I want to program for fun, including some products with financial potential. I have books to read, research to do, blogs to write, places to go with my pup, and even games to play.
I am finally ready for the cycle to start again.
Cash Flow 