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Rants and ravings from a techy brit.
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Hacking or Tangent

Posted 6 years ago.

So I as I was lying in bed last night I decided to browse some WikiHow on my phone for LULZ. I started looking at their "Computers and Electronics" section, to see if I could learn anything new. After all, I pride myself in not knowing everything. If I did know everything there was to know about everything, I'd be simultaneously very rich and very bored. What's the point of living if you can't learn a few new tricks every now and again? For example, I literally just got distracted for about 5 minutes trying to unbind my Backspace key. Why? Because I remembered that I had set my right Alt key to be Backspace too, so now I have decided that I may as well try to force myself to use it permanently.

You may be asking yourself:

But why Nathan?! Why would you force yourself to do something that really doesn't need to be done?

Well, my friend, the answer to that is simple. Why do anything, ever? Honestly, it's a good question, and one that I can answer with two simple points:

  • If it has to be done or,
  • If it's fun.

There's really no other reason for doing anything, if you boil it down. Why did the Europeans try to find the New World? A little column A, a little column B. They felt that plundering the new seas was necessary to their respective empires, and because they thought it'd be a laugh. Probably, I'm not a historian.

The main point of all of this is that there is a reason for all of this. There is a reason for almost everything I do, be it simply getting out of bed in the morning, going to school (soon to be work), hacking code together, playing video games, writing this very blog, even staring into space. Everything that everyone does can be split into one of the two categories, and it is important that we get a mix of the two together to get a strong and stable work/life balance. If we do too many things just because they have to be done, then we'll spend all our time never focusing on the little things in life like the dust in sunbeams, that cute girl that smiled at you in the restaurant or the support network that your friends and family give you, I hope. On the flip side of the coin, if we spend too much time doing things just because they are fun, we can cease to be a productive and functional member of society.

If you are one of the rare few people that gets to do things that they have to that are also fun, treasure it. Most people hate their jobs, so I'm told. You're one of the lucky few that broke that cycle and did a blend of the two. What you get to do is incredible, make the most of it. You never know how much time you have left, so live every minute to the fullest.

If you're with the rest of us, try not to get too down in the dumps. 99% of the world has to do stuff that they'd really rather not do so that they can keep eating, drinking and having their standard of living stay at the same rate. And that's fine, it really is. Like I said before, it's only a few of us get to do what we really want to do. It's what we do with our free time that matters. Go out, meet up with your mates, dance with the opposite sex, call your mum or do anything else that you think might just be fun, interesting, social or down right weird. No one knows where the next step will take you, but you can have a lot of fun while you're getting there.

Damn, that was a bit of a tangent, wasn't it? All because I decided to change up my UX a little. I guess I'll talk about WikiHow's "l33t h4x" another time, but for now I think I'm gonna sign off for the night.

Good night all, I wish you all the very best in literally anything (productive or fun) that you do.

Yours,

Natfan.