[Length: around 500 words. Content: a glorified book review]

Everything starts with a name. I recall wondering when I started off this blog - what was my purpose? What did I want to say?

The conceit I arrived at was simple - I'm exploring the world. I live in cities. I'm a programmer. What’s a hybrid of all these things? An Urban REPL - that is, Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop.

Do a thing. Think about what I learned from doing that thing. Write about doing that thing. Repeat.

That's the conceit of Urban REPL: Do more things, and share the good news of all the things that I found.

As I find myself in a transitory phase, I wonder. Did I get it all wrong? Was the conceit doomed from the start because it was asking the wrong question?

This year, I've been taking things a little bit more slowly. I've been reading more. Two books form the outline of an in idea my mind - How To Be Bored by Eva Hoffman, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical novel of Michaelangelo.

Expressed most simply, the idea is this - are we all, in the modern west, trying to do too much? Have I been following all the most corrupt, all the most flawed, philosophies and habits of the society in which I find myself? This idea is captured in the simple acronym - FOMO. Why do so many of us feel like we're missing out on something important each day?

I don't know the answer to this myself, but I do wonder.

Eva proscribes for all of us to take an active intention into our leisurely pursuits. That is, we should intentionally take time to reflect on our values, to engage with nature, or to have simple time in which we think about almost nothing at all. From these acts we gain a deeper understanding of our own needs and values, which we can then use to better guide the decisions we make in our day to day life.

The story of Michaelangelo, for me, helped me better realize my own nature, helped me better accept that this kind of intentional leisure could help me make better decisions. In the story, there are parts where he is jealous of Raphael, of da Vinci, and their devoted followers - as he lives in a decrepit apartment, working 20 hours a day. Despite this, did he not create miraculous works of art that we still enjoy today? Despite this, was he not satisfied with his accomplishments when he had a chance to look over them on his deathbed? In my own case, if I know that I’m doing good work...if I’m doing work that adds to the world, that needs to be done...then I can take some solace in that. Could I do more? Perhaps. But also, perhaps not.

When I combine the lessons from these two books, I come to a simple conclusion: know thyself. Sometimes, for however complex the process it takes to get there - some 800 pages of novel and philosophy - all that matters is that you get there.

[Length: around 1400 words. Content: an intensely vulnerable story - my “grown-ass adult” origin story, if you will. Features my emotional experiences and growth over the past few years, starting from depression to where I am today, and expressing my hope that you might find the same positivity in your life]

Friends! As I approach my 28th birthday, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my past few years of adulthood. This a story to say: I’ve taken a journey towards emotional wholeness, and I’m still weird and you’re welcome. This is a story to say: if you're at your edge, I feel you, I've been there. This is a story to say: there are causes worth giving to and pitching into, please find yours, and consider GiveWell. This is a story to say: I’ve tried to find loving communities, I think I’ve found some, and I hope you find some that fit you. This is a story to say: I'm really excited for the next decade, there are always difficulties, but opportunity exists where change exists.

Emotional Wholeness

Let's start with emotional wholeness. I'll be honest, emotional wholeness is still a hard concept for me to pin down. Perhaps, as Kristen Neff describes, this is the ability to hold our hands to our hearts and say “It’s hard, sometimes, feeling [lonely/anxious/embarrassed/what have you]. But everyone feels this way sometimes. Yes, may I be gentle and understanding with myself. Yes, may I be as compassionate as possible in this moment.” Or it’s about having a rich vocabulary of emotional words to describe our internal experience - https://www.cnvc.org/sites/default/files/feelings_inventory_0.pdf . Yet again, it might be as simple as the ability to cry when we feel sad, to laugh when we learn something new.

I don’t know for sure, but I do know I'll always remember one of the low points in my life. It was December 2015; I was still playing a lot of video games. In particular - and this remains embarrassing for me to say - I was consumed by a hentai game, a game where my characters were saving the world and having plenty of sex along the way. My best friend, Chris, texted me to see if I wanted to go climbing. This weekend was the first time, to my recollection, that I didn’t want to answer him, that I didn’t even respond with a simple “no”. For the first and only time in my life, I considered suicide. I was hooked. I was ashamed. I hid.

The depths I felt then remain the deepest I’ve experienced depression. I got better, and this took time. Healing absolutely took the help of friends and therapists - thank you for your timely suggestions and a quick emergency turnaround back in 2015, Dr. L. Thank you for your constant understanding over our year of work together and your encouraging me to get out to 1st UU, M. Thank you for a countless number of friendly walks, Scott. Thank you for your love, mom and dad and S. To all of my readers, if you’ve made it this way into the piece and feel those depths, I encourage you to consider if therapy is right for you - one of my goals in writing this personal piece is to help normalize therapy. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to need help.

I say all this because I’ve been complimented, now and then - stuff like “you live a really interesting life” or “you’ve got a lot of willpower”. While the former might be true, and the latter less so, I think it’s important that we all recognize our shared experience. I feel anxiety, sometimes. I feel tired, sometimes. I also feel joy and excitement and focus. I’m human, and I hope no one ever tries to make me an idol. My life now is a product of years of work, of experimentation; this process is never complete because I’m still human, and being human in any world is hard. From my own experience, I can shout it to the rooftops: change is hard, and it takes time. Please be patient with yourself.

Causes

One belief carried me through my darkest hours in 2015: the belief that I’m at least doing some good in this world. I still remember a time that I actually stopped for a solicitor on the street; it was after work in 2013, the solicitor was cute, and I felt like talking to someone. She was with Save the Children and wanted me to sponsor a child, to support one child’s education in Africa.

I didn’t sign up.

Instead, I did my research. I’m something of a rationalist - friends know that I’ll sometimes give odds about an outcome, like my giving “60% odds that David comes out to dance this week” (he joined! Props, dude). Much of self-labeling as a rationalist means trying to have accurate models of reality. (This could mean, say, having powerfully predictive models like https://www.fs.blog/mental-models/ or rigorously updating beliefs based on new information like https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/?l=1zq )

In the midst of this research into how much good my donation might do, I was reminded of the effective altruist movement, and in particular GiveWell’s work. GiveWell’s research is detailed, impressive, and clearly articulates one view about how the world works and how to best contribute charitable dollars for good. I also recalled Peter Singer’s basic idea, that most well-off folks can donate 10% of their income to charity without significant changes to their lifestyle. Reams of paper could be written about how charities work. Reams could be written about how different charities are, or are not, effective.

To keep this simple: I agree that GiveWell’s recommendations are a worthwhile investment.

So, ever since 2013, I’ve donated 10% of my pre-tax income to causes identified by GiveWell. Recently, I’ve also allocated 1% of my income going to carbon offset projects, and $500 to 1st UU here in Philadelphia. These donations are fairly impersonal and small, yes, but they still benefit the world. They’ve still helped me retain a belief that I have much to give to the world, even when I found myself in my darkest hours.

Loving Community

For years, I've tried out new activities - if you met me on the dance floor, at choir, at a SMART group, improv, or up in Boston, or at Curalate, or Inspire, then you've already seen evidence of this. What I hope to see in everyone’s life is a sense that they’re tied to a loving community. Humans are a pro-social species. One particularly strong demonstration of this was found by Emile Durkheim - the more socially integrated a person is in society, the less likely they are to commit suicide.

In this vein, I’ve found no community as personally satisfying to me as dance. Consider my background - a tech worker, staring at a screen all day, hooked on video games for years. And then consider dance - all genders joyously participating, shared movement, and a common love of music. Dance meets emotional needs that, years ago, I hardly even knew I had. I feel alive when I dance; I feel interesting and fun when I dance; I have a low-pressure environment where I can meet new friends. For all this and more, I love dance.

Still, I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll repeat it again: change takes time. What communities might you find in your life, I wonder? Perhaps you might find yourself in a language-learning group, excited by the possibility of learning a new way of interacting and practicing that skill in a foreign country. Perhaps you might find yourself, as I did, joining the MKP for an intensely vulnerable weekend retreat. Perhaps you’ll find yourself at a “Women in X” event, engaging in all that feminism has to offer the world. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I hope you find yours.

Closing

It’s amazing to me that I can write all of this and realize there’s a whole other half to me, and that one of these days I’ll have to establish my creed as an engineer. Now, I like working to ensure that the technologies and processes underlying everyone's life are as clean, practical, reliable, invisible as possible (should out to CCL and Inspire here).

Those are stories for another time.

By this point, I’m sure I’ve made myself “that strange guy” on the internet among everyone I know. That’s cool with me - if I can help even one person by talking through my own shame and history, I say it’s worth it. As long as you’ll consider reaching out to a friend to offer or receive help in this crazy modern world, it’s worth it.

[Length: around 950 words.  Content: probably pointless and redundant musings about social media and technology, as if I wasn't a software engineer that should blindly eat these things right up]

When I reflect upon the modern world, and my place in it, the impacts of social media and technology are clear.  I am, of course, employed as a software engineer.  Most of my friends and acquaintances are IT workers in some capacity.  Many of the people I know are huge techies; interested in the latest phone and apps; true early adopters.  Even well outside of this circle of early adopters, Facebook has over 1 billion monthly active users, and billions of people worldwide have a smartphone.

Technology has this reach into all of our lives, and meanwhile we debate whether internet addiction is a real diagnosable condition.  Respectable publications include musings about whether healthcare providers should analyze social media usage to look for indicators of depresion.

Everyone has to decide for themselves what their relationship to these technologies is; simply pretending these tools don't exist, or will go away, is magical thinking.  Since I recently deactivated my Facebook account - partly as a formality, since I rarely used it, and partly as an experiment, to see if it would affect how I interact with the world - I wanted to share my personal experience.

Why Deactivate?

For people that have known me for a while, it might not be terribly surprising to learn that I deactivated my account.  It's true - I've never been a heavy user of any social media.

But even with that caveat, I often had much the same negative experience as others when going onto Facebook.  Perhaps I go on, and lo, there's content I care about!  A friend from college is having a baby, or is getting married, or is sharing something meaningful that draws me into their world for just a few moments.

More often, though, I did not have this positive experience.  More often, I would go on and compulsively refresh the news feed a few times.  More often, I would go on and see an endless stream of the same rehashed content from various acquaintances.  More often, I would go on and become annoyed by the advertisements I see.  More often, I would check my notifications only to realize that there was nothing important going on.  More often, it was simply a waste of my time, time that I could've spent doing something productive - contributing to open source, or reading, or working on my site, or volunteering, or any number of other things.

So I decided to experiment.  I decided to cut FB out of my life completely.  Would I lose anything of value?

What Then?

The simple answer is this: no, I did not lose anything of significant value to me.  On the most important qualitative metric to me - how engaged with life am I? how much action am I taking on my own or others' behalf? - well, life is good.  Before deactivation, FB was one source of distraction that would occasionally have the pull to take me away from action; now, this hasn't been possible.  This post itself is one piece of evidence that I now act more regularly - these are my words, my expression of self, my experimental results - and one that I am just a little proud of.

Perhaps much of this could've happened if I tried sharing all my tiny success and struggles with my network on FB.  I'm skeptical; again, while internet addiction is not officially in the DSM, the fact that this is even being raised as a question makes the usage of social media and many web-based tools a decision which demands our scrutiny, not our lazy acceptance.

What Now?

I am certainly not alone in trying out an experiment like cutting out social media.  I will certainly not be the last.

That said, I do expect to re-establish some presence on social media again.  While some past friends might find this surprising, I legitimately enjoy social situations now, I legitimately enjoy making the effort to express myself in a variety of contexts.  Social media is a potentially valuable tool, a potentially valuable context in which to express myself and engage with a variety of ideas I wouldn't otherwise encounter in my daily life.  Engaging my curiousity is absolutely one of my guiding principles, one of my north stars in navigating life.  Reading books with depth has long been one of my tools for engaging this, and I expect that I'll try, time and time again, to use social media to the same end.

When I re-establish this presence, my footprint will definitely be light.  I will prefer publishing content to consuming content - and, ideally, publish content that isn't completely useless.  I will limit the number of influencers and major players that I subscribe to.  I will keep discipline in mind, and attempt to structure my usage so that I don't end up naively refreshing for the next hit of dopamine.

When I re-establish this presence, I will engage social media with that in mind, I'll enter this "publish-heavy mode".

Reflections for You

So the above are my considerations; my plans for engaging technology now and in the future.  Personally, I'd love to hear your experience in managing the technologies and social media tools in your life.  Or other experiments one could try out - I've cut out any contract with an ISP before, opting to only hotspot off of my phone.  Perhaps you might benefit from tips that The Guardian has published, or The Telegraph, or perhaps you like outsourcing your tips to Quora.

Either way, know that this is a global phenomenon, and know that it's worth doing some real introspection and reflection on what your relationship to the technology of the modern world should be. 

[Length: around 900 words.  Content: tips on contributing to OSS, because the world needs yet another guide to pitching in]

Getting started on open source projects can be intimidating.  The questions abound: what project should I work on?  What projects are in my preferred programming language?  Will I be able to learn the new hot technology if I pitch in here?  Will I get any benefit out this work?  How much time will this require?  Really, if you've ever considered contributing, you know that this list isn't even close to exhaustive.

Here's one thought on how to pitch in: just do it.  Find your most local affiliate of Code for America, identify the project that's been most recently updated, find an issue, and just do it.  Before you take up too much time on behalf of the project maintainers, your goal is to make a solid contribution ASAP.  That means a feature, a bug fix, a documentation improvement - something that improves the lives and lightens the workloads of the primary developers - before you pitch in on smaller nitpicks like code style, commenting functions, etc.

Now, you might think that the slogan "just do it" is great for Nike, but it's actually a little deeper than that.

Indeed, I'd go so far as to call it - at least potentially - a basic psychological principle.  The act of taking action, itself, generates desire and attachment to whatever action you commit to.  It's incredibly easy, in our modern age, to get stuck in a kind of analysis paralysis, to get caught in the paradox of choice.  So while "just do it" sounds like a silly pithy - and it is! - it's also a surprisingly deep, viable strategy for choosing how we all operate in this world.

Let's take a look at what this might look like.

Case Study: Delta Bot Three

Of course, the specific strategy I outline to making your first contributions will not necessarily be how it looks in the real world.  So it goes.

That does not mean, however, that the "just do it" pithy doesn't apply.  It does - it can just take a variety of guises.

Take my work on DB3, for example - a reddit bot that helps moderate the /r/changemyview subreddit (if you're not familiar with the subreddit, take a look - it's among the best online forums I've seen for tackling such subjects as it does).  If you look at my PRs on the project, you'll notice that I started with a bug fix, made a few small improvements to the documentation on getting the bot up and running, and tried to keep my changes & communication levels down until I got to making a feature PR later. 

I wasn't sitting there, taking up lots of time, trying to perfectly analyze where I might get started.  I saw an issue, I tackled it, I moved on.

If I switch hats for a moment, to my own experience as a repository owner and team lead, this is exactly the kind of thing I like to see - someone new to the codebase getting down and dirty with the code and the real-world problems the code is trying to solve.  This contributes a form of knowledge to the project that I, as the owner of the repo, no longer have - a fresh newbie look at the code!  And it frees me of having to deal with a few small bugs, documentation issues, etc.

Want to know one extra tagalong feelgood to this "just do it" strategy?  If you're successful, folks notice and want you to help more!  It's a lovely, empowering feeling - that our work helped someone out.  I shall remain grateful, in this project, to the subreddit moderator who kept us all devs engaged in working on the bot and moving things along. 

Case Study: Yadaguru

At other times, the strategy works out almost exactly as described!  So it was with this project.  I live in Philadelphia, and lo, we have Code for Philly.  After a quick pass through some of the active projects at CfP, I found Yadaguru, and I've been pitching in little bits here and there since then.

Yadaguru is a tool that helps high school seniors remember all the various deadlines they have for submitting applications to colleges.  And man - there are a lot of steps!  Certainly the process today seems both more electronic and - perhaps surprisingly - more complex than college applications not that long ago, in 2008, when I filed my applications.  So I can see how this tool could be helpful to some folks, and it fits with the tech stack I know, and it dovetails with other things I'm doing these days.

And - did I mention?  Bob - the project development lead - setup a great wiki page on setup instructions for the project.  You don't always get instructions that high quality even in private industry.

Find a project - Yadaguru.  Find an issue - "content on mobile gets cutoff during onboarding process".  Then pitch in.  Try to keep your mindset, and your changes, small, and just do it.

Wrapping Up

Remember - take action; just do it.

When you act, inspiration and motivation are bound to follow, and others just might notice.  While there are no guarantees in life, when it does happen, it's an incredibly gratifying experience and is bound to get you hooked just a little bit more.  I look forward to hearing your stories of your positive contributions to OSS and the world at large!