I can never forget that chapter and how well Feynman expressed his burnout. It's hard to imagine that even charming roguish nobel prizewinning physicists who play the bongos can feel useless sometimes. I think most likely everyone has, but it doesn't make for a very interesting blog post unless it's followed with "but I turned it all around with the Pomodoro technique!"

Nobody picks a date and says "from that point on, I'm going to grow up and lose my sense of wonder", but still it happens. I worry, sometimes, about how dangerous slow changes can be. The boiling frog thing turned out to be a myth, but the fact that it still persists as pseudo-fact tells you something about how well it aligns with our experiences. I saw a child today play for, honest to god, about half an hour with a low concrete wall. What if I'm just getting a little bit less playful every day?

With achievement I feel like you have an internal zero point that you measure from. But the zero has a dangerous tendency to climb. When I was a child I felt like the zero was at, well, zero. People got impressed if I just managed to fall over with gusto. Now I'm a proper software developer and aspiring startup guy, the zero is more like being well paid writing good code for successful projects that make an impact but are also somehow deeply meaningful, about which I make clever insights while blogging, tweeting, plussing and getting a million internet points on Hacker News.

Even if it's not quite that bad, expectations build up pretty quickly, and it's easy to end up worried about being in the negative. Why can't it all just be positive? Imagine if you could return to the days when just getting something to compile was a victory that would stay with you for days. I don't really know if it's possible, but I have been making some attempts to try.

I read a book on Stoicism that was referenced on Tim Ferriss's blog (that he writes from the deck of his jumbo yacht on the shores of lake always successful), and it actually had a lot of great stuff to say about how to stop expectations wrecking your happiness. But even armed with the ability to bring up Marcus Aurelius at dinner parties, it's tough going. I've cut down to one day a week of work (and pretty fun work with a low responsibility factor) on the theory that I should undersubscribe myself for a while and let myself naturally gravitate towards things I like without an expectation they'll be my life's work, or even very good at all.

That's meant I've spent a lot more time doing things, but I still feel a sense of residual nervousness that things I do will be bad. My website, for example, has been blank page for nigh unto half a decade now, just because I want to write something good on there and I'm not sure whatever I write will be good. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Having written this now I look back and it seems long and rambly without any particular point other than what goes through my head when I think about that part of Feynman's book. I feel an overwhelming urge to go back and tidy it up, try to tie it all into a nice conclusion or something. Maybe that's the point, though. Can't I just be proud of the fact that I wrote something without worrying that I should be able to do better? Maybe we're all standing around worried but nobody says anything because it would ruin our carefully tended never-fail image. Alright, I'm going to post it. Here goes...