Saturday, April 13, 2024

Work as Entertainment

I conjecture that entertainment is like a leak. If conventional sources of it become unattractive, then you will begin to find things that once were boring or scary, entertaining.

If you're smart, that includes software development. Which has a lot of pain points.

I say entertainment but it's really something else. It's the something that used to motivate me to build things with legos. It's a cross of ambition and curiosity. If you decide that you want to be a computer science person, it means you're (mostly likely) not going to be an authority on matters of physics, biology, history, or art.

You won't seek entertainment in the name of procrastination. You will be able to overcome procrastination in the name of ambition and curiosity. The pain of software development will become tolerable, even something you combat by introducing controls on complexity. The fear of math will fade.

There are some who can say that watching TV or reading fiction is an exercise of their mind. But this isn't what a computer scientist would say, in the course of their career. The act of construction is their act of the mind.

Entertainment is supposed to be healthy but I think I have allies would who argue that it's often garbage. It's fine to seek achievement in the workplace instead of low-brow entertainment. I know not everyone has the privilege of having an easy choice between those two alternatives. I hope those people find entertainment that speaks to them.

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