Unemployment week three. It’s been so very long.

This week I actually wrote down a few bullet points of what I did each day, so I have a much more comprehensive picture to work with. This was good and I will continue to do it.

Last week’s goals were:

• make substantial progress on, if not finish, the first assignment of the cs course

I spent a lot of time on this, but am unfortunately probably less than halfway done. (though they did maybe say the tokenizer was the worst part, and ive done that at least?) I think I spent a pretty okay amount of time on this, but I felt like I was a lot less efficient / effective than I should have been and hope I will improve next week. I still have all of next week to do it staying on track with the course, so partial success unless I can’t pull it together next week.

• have a minimal playable prototype of my voice game

Abject failure. I spent exactly zero minutes on it since declaring it to be my goal last week. I will claim however this was a strategic conservation of resources, as it felt more important to prove to myself I could make progress on this course. I’m not really sure why I felt like that, as now visualizing the scenario in which I had completed this goal but not the first one, it seems perhaps equally good.

Overall casey goodness score: 0.5/2.

One lesson is to be wary of two goals that draw from the same well of internal resources, as I often felt worn out from “technical problem solving” style activities that made me want to switch to a non-goal activity instead of between the two goals. Regardless I think I could have done a lot better, though there were also some extenuating social factors and I did a decent amount of both generative and non-generative hanging out.

I also lost a full day (saturday) to sleep issues, which won’t happen next week.

Next week:

• Finish the assignment (i.e. have my language model implemented and trained)

• Talk to some new people who I don’t normally talk to.

• Maybe do some writing again its been over a month since the last published moment! Making these normally helps me understand what’s happening in my life a lot better.

The course has a side effect of making me feel really bad about myself when I can’t figure something out (e.g. being stuck implementing the tokenizer for a day or two). It seems like this is obviously a good thing to exposure therapy myself to, but I should maybe also attempt to mitigate/offset somehow.

More abstractly, I don’t really feel like I am generating forward momentum, if that makes sense. Like I’m trying to do things, but there is some journey that has not begun, and I’m not engaged in searching in the right way either. The path has not yet been revealed to me. I don’t totally know what’s wrong.

Thank you for reading.