jcd

roguelike developer, poet

I write poetry and code in a cold place.


whatnames
@whatnames

how would you fill your days?
what would you do to occupy your time?
who would you spend the hours with when you are not spending them with coworkers?
what have you put off having not been able to afford the time/energy/money to do it?

i am genuinely asking. what would you do with your life?


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in reply to @whatnames's post:

The same things I do every night: practice viola and guitar, write, work on my game. Run for an hour or more. I don't do all of these every night. It would be amazing to have the time and space to get to them all, always.

Expand back yard farm. Something where it doesn't take up all my time from dawn to dusk, but where I spend a decent amount of time with my garden/animals. I've wanted to get into breeding rabbits for meat and fur. I would love to have the time to get back into sewing/quilting and soap making. Basically would like to get more into homesteading and maybe even teaching people about it. I just don't want to become the "We live 100% off of the land, and only for ourselves" type of person though.

The biggest challenge, I think, is that a lot of Good Works one can feel good about spending one's time doing have, as an inevitable byproduct, Other Work that comes with the territory. Teachers almost never just teach, because any school is an ecosystem of instructors and administrators and so there are memos and committees and meetings that can't be avoided. Writing, making art, and making games that others enjoy entails dealing with that audience, who (given any level of success in getting your work out there) will include some who are toxic, and others who simply don't understand boundaries.

So it's a genuinely difficult question, because it's hard for me to think of how I would spend my time that wouldn't feel like it had some share of genuine labor to it, whether formally paid or not. If my darkest, most time-slippery periods of the COVID lockdown are any indication, a life entirely without work would not be one in which I would thrive.

ah, extremely fair point. i should specify my question: if you didn't have to have a job to continue having food, clothing, shelter, etc. - what would you labor on? i know i'd keep "working" should i not have to work, but i certainly wouldn't be working at most of my current jobs because i am literally only there to collect money.

For my part, time is not well spent if I'm not conveying something. Doing creative stuff is great, but it feels hollow if I can't see a road for it to eventually have an audience. Having experiences does very little for me, on a spiritual level, if I can't then communicate something profound to others as a result of that experience. So some combination of writing, teaching, extemporaneous criticism, and creative nonsense for public consumption all feel like they're necessary. To the extent that I have these in my life already, everything else that isn't those things (meetings, work emails, workplace politicking, other life-sustaining chores) is, to one degree or another, in service of continuing to be able to do those things.

i would probably be doing stuff i actually want to do, making various Things™ (furniture, woodcraft, etc) and learning how to build other bigger or cooler things, or who knows! literally anything i'd want to! along with my friends, or my neighbors!!! days filled with leisure or productivity as desired by all involved. liberation from profit motive, a ludic fulfillment that almost no one alive has yet experienced. true freedom.

the problem i have now (personally and more broadly) is that the things i want to do require capital and initial investment, along with time i don't have, where I'm perpetually feeling trapped and running out of it. (insert the meme of "that unemployed friend at 2pm on a Tuesday" here) literally me {ideal post-capital society}

related, i don't really 100% like Bob Black, but «The Abolition of Work» is such a fun disruptive read. picturing a vastly different way of life is difficult, but i have zero reservations that it would be better than what i, and we all, have now.

Most likely try to teach. I know personally i get extremely bored if I have nothing to do. Sure I'd probably spend more time with friends, but even that I would get bored of after a while.

So I'd probably go into teaching. Always have wanted to, but it hasn't worked out so far, in part because of money.

In that same vein, I'd want to go back to school. Or like, a place of learning.
Even when classes weren't my favorite, having a constant stream of fascinating topics and skills to build while in community with other people is something I miss dearly and I feel like I don't have many opportunities for it in my life at present. I suppose that's something I can change, but... still (similarly: money). :host-stare:

Yeah it's annoying how often money comes up lmao It's one of those things too where, when I was in school, hated learning. Sucked so much because I had to do it. But after leaving, being somewhere where I could just sort of learn in a somewhat structured environment, things I actually want to learn, sounds so cool.

I'm not sure what sort of skills you're interested in developing, but if they're at all medeival related and you're in the US, you can check out the SCA. Imagining larping but with, at a bare minimum, hard plastic armor and people hitting each other with wooden sticks. The events though, and the people who are in the SCA, generally have a lot of old timey skills and most events I've been to have people giving classes on these things. So blacksmithing, tapestry, scroll work (forgetting the nice name for it), leather work, cooking, etc.

oh goodness i hadn't even considered the educational side of SCA. like, of course there's learning involved. i'm going to have to see where there's a branch near me. thank you for the recc!