Life Optimization Routine

In the past 48 hours or so, I’ve had this sudden urge to do some life-code optimization. It’s a weird programmer motivation: while what you have cobbled together might actually work, there is almost always a more efficient, elegant, or more stable way to do it…

This past weekend I paused to look around, evaluating whether I have yet found the good life, and I just had this overwhelming feeling of “this isn’t quite working right… you have to fix it.”

So, being a dreamful experimenter, I resolved to begin a hack-a-thon. A great optimization. Banzai and Bombs Away.

I think quite a few areas of my existence are going to get an overhaul: transportation, finances, work, diet… even the morning get-me-going routine isn’t safe from my tinkering (shower first then shave? or the other way around?).

My mind is a bit flooded right now, so I’m taking it a little bit at a time… iterating design, making the incremental changes, and collecting the feedback… figuring out what works and what’s stupid.

Motivator: There is a lot of weird, intriguing, potential-laden brew boiling over in my calamity of too many pots. Perhaps due to gross negligence, in some places I’ve let loose some of the eccentricities. Surprisingly, I’ve have had enough positive feedback (internal, external, maybe eternal?) to affirm that maybe it’s time to let looniness take over for a bit; I think it’s time to open the fire hose.

For example, one of the first things to go is the car. Probably not cold turkey; my day job pretty much demands reliable transportation throughout the day. But there is some opportunity there to optimize (ex. scrunching errands to one or two days).

Side Note: “Day Job” – What an asinine nomenclature. I constantly let it spill out into the night. This, incidentally, is a Sure Symptom of a LifeCode Bug. Definitely a memory leak or an off-by-one error.

I don’t think I have a real convincing REASON to stop driving a car. I certainly don’t have a militant, activist, environment-saving subroutine (in fact I often scoff at those that do).

Because of where I live, any potential money savings are probably negated by the inconvenience and time inflation.

My car is falling apart, for sure, but I have enough socked away to get a new one if need be.

See, I think that’s the crux of it… what do I need? What is “enough?” How can I declutter and streamline and fix?

Ask a programmer: optimization can be a very challenging task. It takes a special sort of patience to bug-hunt when you don’t really know what you’re looking for. It requires a very delicate touch not to crash the system with aggressive fixes in some component that only introduce cascading errors in multiple others.

Perhaps it’s the shake-up of a good challenge (much like trying to scale Everest). Maybe a self-awareness mortality bit finally flipped over and I realize I’m far behind schedule. Regardless, it’s time.

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I sent out an email to a group of friends this morning and I thought it might be worth repeating here (edited for extraneous or incriminating text):

I had quite a run of disasters last week. Let me
put it this way: I think I’m going to have to start taking the bus to work as often as possible from now on. (I should be doing that anyway… Save the environment (Please.), recover commuting time as usable work time, create an urbanist/hipster lifestyle, etc)

Sad.

The good news is that I had 3 days of uninterrupted, quiet reading and thinking time this weekend.

And BOY did I do some thinking…

Approximately 11:36PM on Sunday, I had a massive mental core dump… my brain suffered a Biological Blue Screen of Death. Hard to describe, but
what proceeded was a mixture of a panic attack, a cascade of Eureka epiphanies, and a frenzy of scribbles which we will graciously call “notes” or with even more leniency, “plans”…

It went on for a good 20 hours or so.

I’m not sure I recovered… Certainly haven’t fully rebooted. I had to take a Sleepinol last night to fall asleep… So I’m still in quite the daze.

So……

Perhaps Nunez finally snapped?

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