Back in January of 2019 I bought a 55" UHD TV that I used as my main monitor for a few months.

Ultimately, I found that 55" was too big for me relative to the distance that I was sitting from the screen.

Currently I am back to using a 27" PC monitor with 2560x1440 resolution. I use this same monitor both when I use my desktop computer and when I use my laptop. In the latter case I have the additional monitor of the laptop itself, a 13.3" Retina (2560x1600) MacBook Air 2018 model, but it is sitting at an angle.

There were multiple issues with using a 55" UHD TV for me. A couple of the main issues that I had with using that TV as my main computer monitor were:

1. The pixels were a bit too visible at the distance I was sitting.

2. The upper 1/3 portion of the monitor or so was basically outside of my field of view, and as were the left and right 1/4 portions of the monitor. Turning my head, the fact that the display itself was flat still made it uncomfortable to use these areas of the screen.

3. In the RGB components of each individual pixels, there was one of them that dominated too much. I think it was the red component but I don't quite remember. To combat this I adjusted the settings quite a bit, and even reduced the saturation heavily. Still it felt sort of strange.

But even with the better experience of going back to my 27" monitor and sometimes additionally using laptop display on the side, I often feel restricted in terms of screen real estate.

Lately I have been feeling a lot like it is an impossible battle.

On top of that I am beginning to feel more and more tired from looking at my monitors, and I also find sitting down in front of my computers both restricting in how I am postured and in the poor quality of the chair that I am sitting on. I am turning 30 years old later this year.

I feel that more and more that for me the joy of computing is becoming overshadowed by tiresomeness and feelings of being restricted, both physically in how I am sitting and moving and in terms of screen real-estate and in interacting with code and data in general.

I feel like I used to be able to marvel at things on the screen when I was much younger and to not be so bothered about the restrictions of posture and of what could be displayed at once and how I could interact with them.

I am left thinking that perhaps my mental capacity is starting to shrink as part of the ageing process of my body, but then I also think that perhaps it is not so much this as it is simply that the things I am working on now requires keeping track of a lot more things at once than the number of things I had to keep track of when I was young and still learning and working on simpler things.

In the beginning of my twenties I was concerned with optimizing my desktop environment for productivity. This was largely a time sink, and not something that I have desired to do anymore for several years now. But at the same time, I feel that I am wearing myself out sitting in front of the computer. And I feel that it shouldn't be this way.

For a while, when VR was new, I was intrigued by the idea of using VR as a working environment. Never went as far as to buy a VR headset but I've since lost a lot of the faith in VR as a magical silver bullet. Perhaps in the future sometime VR will be a solution to some of the problems I am experiencing, but I don't think the tools exist today to really take advantage of VR for coding and for working with data. Furthermore, having those displays on your head for hours on end is sure to be even more physically exhausting than looking at the monitors on my desk which themselves are already wearing me down.

I guess at this point I am basically rambling. But the point that I want to get to is that I believe that the way we work with code and data today is really really far from what would be the best for us. And I don't feel like I have the time nor the energy to tackle that problem either.