## Writings (about myself) from 2010s There is his uncanny Sisyphean relationship to mathematics. No matter how much he appreciates its profoundity, he can't seem to engage in it, after all these years of struggle, and probably for decades to come. Actually, his doomed "life" is Sisyphean altogether. He has of course considered putting an end to it all, a rather frequent thought of his. But he remains in a perpetual limbo between both voids: his existence and his nonexistence. The void itself paralyzes his own determination of getting anything important done, or undoing himself once and for all. --- His pathological perfectionism, even when his work is fairly often below quality expectations, remains as the pitch-viscous friction that halts him from advancing. He renders himself useless for a wealth of practical purposes, as he feels ultimately compelled to explore what he considers relevant creeks and crevices in what he is supposed to be performing. --- Often he ponders about his very self-provided ending, how to achieve it successfully, how painful it will, how he will look like after he ceases to be in control of his physical presence. He imagines what the scene will look like to people nearest to him, how his acquaintances will react. Most probably, he will be just another figure carried among thousands that year. He won't be remembered for anything worthy, as he won't have achieved anything of value by then. He has convinced himself that the social cost of his existence is far too high. His nonexistence will be more productive, even if he as a workforce unit is missing. Some other human or some machine will easily replace him with far more efficient and reliable performance. His musings are of no interest to anyone, really. He repeats what's out there, anyway. A cloudy modern mirror doesn't do away with the reality of solid ideas from centuries or millenia ago. He won't be missed at all by the relevant gears of productive society, after all. --- ## Marco (Antonio)'s time warp (For a Toastmasters session at Akamai) Good afternoon. I'm Marco Piedra. Well, the whole name is Marco Antonio, but it sounds heavy and burdensome to use the name of a Roman Emperor. I don't like the idea of having too much power. That's why I never engaged into politics. For instance, I never wanted to become a president. Actually, the inspiration for my name comes from a former Saprissa goalkeeper, Marco Antonio Rojas, which my mother admired back then in the 80s. My mother happens to support 2 teams: Saprissa and Pérez Zeledón. Saprissa, because that's where we live, and Pérez Zeledón because it's her home town. I recall having traveled rather often to Pérez Zeledón when I was a kid. It was an unpleasant experience to go by bus for 3 hours, up, up, the Cerro de la Muerte, and then down, down. I got sick because of those turns. My mother's family gathered at my grandparents' house, near Liceo Unesco. Behind that house, there was a finca. I remember having developed an appreciation for some aspects of nature because of that finca. I also remember how anxious I was about getting on time back to San José. In general, getting on time to any event. When we traveled on a weekend. I wanted to make sure we were home on Sunday night. I didn't want to be late for school on Monday. Now I imagine how much of a nightmare it would be for that young Marco Antonio, living nowadays with so much traffic and so many traffic jams, with a high probability of being late for school. --- Hybris has brought him to his knees time and again. Can you imagine he thought he could become a mathematician, having performed so poorly in it at school, or a computer scientist, not having the stamina to tackle complex problems? He also considered himself capable of dealing with customers, even when he has social anxiety. Also, he thought about a career in the humanities, not being a real human himself. Besides, he can't sustain himself. How could he even handle a sentimental relationship with another person? He is bound to an empty existence beyond dispair, not even a life. --- Why does he, after all, try to become a "writer" (yes, with the appropriate quotes), considering he has a hard time even explaining things to himself, let alone to other people? He utterly fails to recognize whether others have comprehended him or sympathized or empathized with him. He isn't by any means able to convey deep meaning. He clumsily aims to produce his own rendering of meaning, as if he were capable of really fathoming intellectual or emotional depth in what he has read or experienced. Even in his self-loathing, he entirely misses the point of introspection and makes his writing constrainingly burdensome to witness. --- (From 2015. As of May 2022, I vividly remember that dream.) Dream (about 5 years ago): It was 10 a.m. (synesthetically relevant, as it's time for anxiety) on a warm day. She and I were in my parents' room, in the house as it was before a lot of changes. We sat there, side to side on the bed, distant from each other. I had a small notepad with a set of questions for Her. I asked Her name and I wrote it down (I can't recall it). Then, the scene changed to the fence, where silkworms were moving across the thin metal grid. Back in the bedroom, I asked Her what she studied. She said "econometrics", which I wrote down. More silkworms were appearing in the grid, beside the mailbox. She seemed annoyed and asked me to call a taxi (no Uber back then). My heart grew heavy. Below the mailbox, there was an egg-shaped eagle figure, which was smashed. Finally, she went away. My mind drifted away and I woke up. I did talk to Her in real life (we take the same bus), but She rejected me, as it was meant to be. Every now and then, I find Her in the bus, but we ignore each other's presence. --- Dream: movie afternoon for celebrating someone's Quinceaños. I'm sitting in a movie theater, to the left. Ill-lit scene. Some Hanna-Barbera's Topcat character (the orange cat) enters the screen from the right. A giant grey cat comes out of the screen, as if detaching itself. Then disappears. The Quinceañera walks in from some alley on the left, talks to someone and leaves. I predict something bad will appear next on screen. I walk to the right and find there's no exit. Someone mentions quantum effects. I try to walk to the left again. While I'm in the middle, the screen turns black with a reddish border, as if someone was covering the camera lens with his hand. I sit down, as I suppose it's me covering the projector. I immediately perceive a shocking, foreboding feeling of something eerie that is about to appear on screen. I get a glimpse of some very large entity grinning on the screen, which became reddish altogether. The screen shows moiré patterns. I feel a high-energy radiation shockwave. Finally, I wake up before I can identify the entity on screen. --- These events are told several years after the initial happening. Everything else followed suit, like an unfinished domino masterpiece for a world record trial being brought down by some smallish, stubborn moth. The problem being that reconstructing the whole scheme would take decades. That harrowing entropy in the universe is engulfing everything. Can't it just get chaos done in some distant galaxy cluster, and postpone the task in this galaxy for an eon later? When he wrote that piece and hung it on the web, the event was in progress. A showbiz bozo was running for President, as it was expected for that time; a woman they all knew would barely win. The country across the pond was drowning, getting pulled into a sandtrap, nevertheless. His country was also caught in the maelstrom. That unarmed nation was getting profoundly upset at all the missteps of former governments and its distinguished lack of entrepreneurship. It depended extremely on whatever jobs that giant could bring. It lost all ability to sustain itself. The scene was metastable: one single push and hell would break loose. It did, in both nations and everywhere, with the final steps for massive civil unrest. Once the New Party appeared and its candidate became Supreme Director, the giant prohibited "unnecessary" or "dangerous" commerce. It was one out of many measures to "curb unpatriotic behavior" and "bring back the deserved greatness". Any idea of welfare was, according to the New Party, worse than the terrorism they fought against back then. Any claim for justice was "against international prosperity", as the New Party and its copycats propagated around the globe. Inconsistent as it was, it seized absolute power. I arrived at his small country, after having to go through many post-"anti-anti-prosperity" measures at all intermediate stops. For those old folks that remember "anti-terrorism", it was child's play in comparison to "anti-anti-prosperity". With post-"anti-anti-prosperity", the party just got started. It was 5 in the morning, after a long rain, when their national anthem without lyrics was played for the last time ever. A rogue, dim, feeble shortwave broadcast, silenced by a stronger signal: "Welcome to the New Era." --- Dream (2017-03-07 00:50 UTC -6) A backyard on a hill. Fence/grid to another backyard. I'm aware of that Entity. I ask the environment where the Entity is. A finger points to a white, blond baby sitting on the other side of the fence. I approach him and ask: "What is your nature?" He answers by asking: "Did you Diablo" (not "Did you play Diablo?"). I promptly answer: "Yes, I did." As he asked that and I was answering, his eyes were becoming large, slanted, completely black, like in the depictions of aliens (cf. "Communion" novel and movie). I end up saying "Let me live". Fearing that he interpreted "live" as "leave", I say "Let me experience." --- It turns out ephemeral, feeble words, when tuned correctly to the frequency of crowds, bring about institutional collapse. --- Intellect is this double-edged weapon: you have fun when solving problems, but get existential anguish when you are unable to. --- No matter how much is done, inequality and abuse of power are inherent to society. Moral shortcomings stay the same through the millenia. --- To live may be to care for a family. But I would be an unstable, unreliable, unsupportive father/partner. So I have remained single for 10y+ We solve engineering problems for the sake of the survival of +7B people and next generations. What is it civilization is surviving for? You are told social causes are just PR tricks and don't matter because they don't make money. What is this we are actually living for? Next 30+ years look threatening bleak: flaky tools, disregard for best eng practices to match deadlines, results you never find good enough. --- Humanist ideals can't be more irrelevant to industry. You are expected to produce and consume. You are the product and the service. Existing by inertia. You're supposed to keep on for your productive skills, as a tool. It's irrelevant you lost any sincere joy in living. --- I still exist without actually living. I doubt I have ever lived. Emptiness has been there for long. How much of a burden am I for society? --- What I expect from myself is too out of sync with what I can do. Whenever I try working harder, I end up wanting to do away with myself. I'm supposed to be a developer, using open source. Yet I haven't written any useful open source library/tool/app. I'm expected to. Immature, a fraud, a failure, unreliable, unstable. Can't find real joy in life. Existing by inertia. When will it halt once and for all? --- I like the quirks and odds of English. Even considered a career. But then I reminded myself it would be naïve to abandon software dev. --- Im DACH-Region gibt es jede Menge vertrauenswürdige Informatiker mit viel mehr DevOps-Erfahrung als ich. Einen DevOps-Job finde ich nie da. There are 3 characters in me: a so-called developer, a math fan, and a linguistics aficionado. None of them is good enough & never will be. --- Perhaps the struggle boils down to cynicism vs. naïveté. We are expected to be cynics to survive, yet find inspiration in the naïve. --- If we ever comprehensively assimilated the unsound depths of all hellish spectra lurking in our psyche, unleashed despair would unfold. Facing the demise of any prospect of maturity in the human nature, unwavering cynicism about the future sprawls in everyday interactions. The great failure of modern times may well be the normalization of sociopathy, amplified unconstrained as it is linked to power. --- A darkness too deep lies ahead. Why should I go on? My soul is already tainted beyond repair. Any attempt of goodness is then contaminated. --- A tech startup is probably bound to stagnate and fail. The game is rigged from the onset. Usually, thinking different(ly) isn't profitable. --- "Free market", like "free speech", is a permanent illusion. There's a degree of business game rigging and censorship in any environment. --- ## Silence Decrypting Madame's emotions remains overwhelmingly intractable. Her silence stands strong as her sound shielding from my entropic noise. Madame, what earnestly convoluted artifactorial complications your foundational silence bears! Those labyrinthine leaves pale in comparison. Madame dreads abysmal deception. Her perceptive acumen forebodes her about my disquieting ambivalence. Her unyielding silence insulates her. The name of Madame I pronounced. I encountered fragmentary brittleness, echoing dispair, heartless void in her otherwise perspicacious gaze. Perchance the egress to the riddle of this schism between Madame and me dwells in her abhor of my pompous lexical pretentiousness. Simple. Her silence translates to behemothial deluges of crystalline writing, drops thereof cohese into amalgamations of her interpretation of me. Beyond the hermetic silent enclosure of Madame thrives a realm of tender selfless care, excluding all but her fortunate selected clique. Madame happens to seize my sensations. After the osmosis through her silence, I was hosted by piquant intelligence and enchanting gestures. Madame veraciously experiences profound meaning in that oneiric melody, her imprinted expression. Its semantic ramifications shroud volumes. Mesmerized by that elusive silent charm of Madame, my psyche wanders astray through branching trails brimming with joyous bliss. --- You shape your writings for an imagined audience that doesn't happen to exist. You actually write for yourself and some occasional readers. Actually, you don't want an audience. You don't want to be confronted with your factual and logical errors. You enjoy the echoed soliloquy. Your code won't do. Your writing is boring. You hardly have friends. You never had a girlfriend. You panic when facing difficult problems. You're extremely rational, skeptic, mistrustful, and investigative. But can't help it when you make impulsive decisions out of sheer fright. --- Don't forget the Oxford comma. A sentence in need of it will look funny at you until you add it. You don't want to upset a sentence, do you? --- While talking to another linguistics fan, I realized I like prog languages for the same reason I like human languages: materialization. When you compile and run a Go/Rust/C++/Java application (or interpret Python/Ruby), you make actions conveyed by formal expressions happen. --- I've long lost any interest in going on existing. Anyone with reasonable training can replace me professionally. Probably won't live over 40 Why 9 more years? Lazy enough to end it all this soon. Perhaps I'll find some so-called "motivation" and decide to go on for a while. Every year will be worst than the last, until I make the final decision. There are millions. Many are excellent professionals. Why stay? --- If I'm this disappointed in my 30s, how hopeless will the next decades be? "Overqualified" often means companies won't hire because of age. As a species, we're individualistic, even when achieving goals in groups. We're inherently evil. Goodness is only occasional. Why live then? --- What often stops/limits me from implementing my ideas as code is my own brutally harsh criticism of myself (I'm never like that to others). While I refer a lot to myself, I actually have little self-love. I project my insecurities through what I suppose others expect from me. I've refrained from relationships times and again (31y, never had a significant other) as I fear how much will be expected from me. --- No software, art, meds, or vacation can end my constant anxiety. Self-obliteration desires become permanent. This isn't life. It's void. I'm emotionally taxing. That's the reason why I hardly have friends (and why I never had a significant other). I just go away after a while. Trying to give sense to my existence by solving problems through software seems utterly preposterous and uncreative. It's just what I'm at. --- These ideas of mine often reflect a profound lack of knowledge and experience about what is possible in software within current constraints. A "dreamer" is an euphemism for a completely worthless person in real world industry. Doesn't address difficult, relevant, actual problems. I suppose I receive too much of the "money is everything, we are just tools, no space for humanity" libertarian Kool-Aid around me. Actually, I've lost any hope whatsoever about our real ability to improve society through technology. We deceive ourselves. Our technology requires social conditions that are inherently unequal (e.g., cheap labor to sustain expensive lifestyles and products). An alternative career (e.g., teach English in poor CR villages) would be out of reach to me. I don't have the necessary social skills. I would have to fight against ever increasing student indiscipline, bullying, drugdealing, death threats (that's what CR teachers endure). --- Several psychiatrists, psychologists, and fluoxetine pills later, I still have a disabling anxiety. I'm useless in this market economy. When you feel miserable with a permanent psychological pain, it's time to end it all. Thousands can replace your. Production never stops. If you stay, you'll waste resources and make processes less productive. Move finally aside. Go away from this world. Let others work. If you can't be productive for the economy, you are worthless in this world. Humanism is totally irrelevant for modern industry. --- I'm 31 and, apparently, a programmer with apparently some experience. I'm supposed to have completed my CompSci BSc long ago. I haven't. Developer jobs in CR are mostly for BSc/MSc graduates, and only for a few of them. I wouldn't stand a chance if I were unemployed. Developer recruiters at IBM, Amazon, etc. in CR won't even look at your resume. It will be filtered out. The game is rigged from the onset. 10 years of experience from odd-jobs in IT are totally meaningless to HR. Tech industry is just ruthless social darwinism. It can't change. The ultimate purpose of real-world market economy and politics is to maximize inequality. There's no way out. This is already a dystopia. Theoretically, markets should find equilibrium. However, in the human world, markets become rigged tools of power for privileged few. Any alternative (socialism, etc.) fails. Humans are cynic and individualistic by nature. There can't be any way to bring harmony to society. Life is inherently, permanently meaningless. There are only mirages and illusions in our existence. Life is beyond hopeless. --- Being your own bully at any time and being vulnerable to yourself at any moment is the purest existential anguish possible. --- ## Barebones of reality I've seen the barebones of reality in my dreams: void. Standing at the threshold of emptiness is reaching the global minimum of the being. Imagine a large ISP datacenter. Millions of images, videos, conversations, webpages, logs, etc. But all you see is metal boxes humming. That's how I perceive reality. Millions of events, persons, words, relations. But nothing more than quantum phenomena without meaning per se I can't perceive a quantum phenomenon. But I'm aware of and acknowledge the components of experiences without really experiencing them. --- ## Hacker News post Hello, HN! I write this in despair, as I can't see a way through. I'm 31 and hail from a small Latin American country. I entered a CS major program in 2006, then switched to a Math major in 2009 until 2014. I began working full time as a UNIX/Linux sysadmin (was part-time sysadmin in college). I'm again in a CS program at another college. However, I still don't have any degree, as I dropped courses whenever I entered in conflict with myself. I consider myself far slower in coding and problem solving than I can accept. Thus, I make very little progress in comparison to what I expect from myself and never get anything complex done. I've been diagnosed with depression and Asperger's and attempted suicide in 2005. Several psychiatrists and psychologists have treated me, but there has been no progress in the treatments. Jobs for backend developers (I'm not into frontend/mobile) in my country are scarce. I've applied without success to dozens of them for years. Thus, a startup around a developer-friendly PaaS kind of makes sense. Nevertheless, whenever I try developing an interesting idea that might be profitable (e.g., a serverless compiler and runtime environment), a part of me thinks it's not worth it. That part of me points out that some Google team probably has a working implementation of a much better idea (backed by PhD research and good engineering) for internal use. That part of me also points out at the utterly hostile business environments out there, and how my half-baked idea won't sell when competing against much better battle-tested products and established development teams. What advice can you provide? Thanks for your time. --- What's really the point in living as a loser, as a failed person? Voluntary extinction makes a lot of sense. I'm only as valuable as a human as my retribution to society (e.g., honest, relevant, meaningful work). I never found my place as a person. I'll get rid of myself at some point in the future. I've been a university student since 2006. It's now 2022 and I'm still an undergrad in computer science. I'll be 36 this year. Indeed, I've worked as a Linux sysadmin and backend dev. I quit in 2019 after like 3 years, like I always do. I even worked at Akamai for 1 month as a Solutions Architect. I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. I wouldn't have survived real work there. Even if I ever graduated, I wouldn't consider myself "qualified" as a computer scientist, developer, or software engineer. After all, who hires a junior/mid dev at 40+??? Ageism is there for a reason. Corporations seek fresh, malleable minds. --- I dreamt I was with a woman cryptographer at the NSA. She was guiding me with some cypher I was researching. Then she left me at the library. There were books on algebra, logic, and history. Someone set fire to a card catalogue, so that they could blame me later.