Friday, July 4, 2014

Exhausted

Does anyone else get periods of time, ranging from days to weeks, where there is no motivation to do anything, at all? I have been experiencing such a thing for the past week or so.

I think it's partially due to my job. I've finally landed a full time job, but it's factory work, so I'm on my feet for 8 hours straight. With it being summer in Kansas, the shift starts at 5 AM. This means I'm getting up stupidly early in the morning, and expending a lot of energy the entire time. (It is nice being home and showered by 2 PM, though.) This takes all the energy and motivation out of me. After I'm cleaned up I'll watch an episode of whatever sci-fi series I'm going through (currently Star Trek: Enterprise) and read for an hour. After that, I don't really do anything.

I don't know, I guess nothing catches my fancy anymore. There has always been something that interested me. But it seems like that's all gone. I feel like I've basically done all I want to do in Minecraft. Although I've wanted to get into Android development, the software needed to do so has fought me every step. Eclipse is a frustrating piece of software. I'm at the point in my web development knowledge that I don't have anymore challenges to tackle. More powerful languages like Java, C#, and so on are already familiar enough to me that I haven't much more to learn.

Taking in as much film and book as I have recently has given me a little boost in writing. New ideas keep popping in my head. I almost wonder if this is something I could channel my energy in. But I can't push myself to get some stuff figured out. I'm exhausted.

Oh, and there are some odds and ends. I briefly had an infatuation with Age of Empires, but that has since passed. I started a blog for learning how to do a math course I'm not too good at. Haven't touched it in over a month. And a couple other miscellaneous blogs.

Work has sapped much of my energy, although I think it's still there. I need something to channel it, though. There are two things I feel would help me. First, I could benefit from finding something practical to do with my skills. I know how to code well enough, but what good is that knowledge if I'm not using it? If nobody is seeing or running the stuff I write? At the moment I just don't have any use for that skill. Or consider writing. I write for the sake of writing sometimes, but it's kind of pointless to me right now. I could try to find an online magazine or something which takes submissions, and write with the intent of being published. The stuff I'm writing isn't being seen by anyone. It's not being published anywhere. There's not much use for it.

Second, it could be time to plain try something new. I was going to do this with Android development, but technical issues got in the way. Trying new things helps me get out of the rut of being exhausted and burned out. I've found it often jump starts my creative and mental energies. What might I try? I could start a vlog. I never do get much privacy, though, and that kind of thing would need to be done with some privacy. I've mentioned my interest in learning history, so that's an option. Or maybe something else. It's not terribly clear to me where I should go from here.