Who am I, and what do I want to do?
That is a question everyone ponders often, I believe. Maybe not consciously, but definitely somewhere along the way. I have been stuck in this kind of mindset for a while, and it is probably because I am graduating soon and I don't plan on studying more for a year or maybe ever, in the context of a university that is. I am going to be moving in with my girlfriend in Latvia, my home country, and attempting to get a feel for life, work and everything that comes along. The problem comes in the form of me being so confused all the time about the question above. One moment I want to do a lot of C++ programming to learn systems and develop skills in audio software, the next I want to make a game, more an art piece in the shape of a game, later I decide to get back into making music or taking photos, sometimes I think about becoming a teacher, living in the mountains to just snowboard and be together with nature and trees, building my own house for fun, whatever it is.
These are just the things that come to mind at first. There is plenty more and I have often tried to list these out and maybe get a sense of like, yeah, I am prioritizing these two to four things right now or whatever. It is all the productivity ideas I believe, but they never truly worked, at least not the way I intended to. For a second I thought I hadn't done any projects (to use a general term for whatever I'm up to) from my own volition. That isn't true. But I evidently do think like that more often than I would like. The only few examples that stand out right now are my blog, the song I recently released on a whim, my attempt at making a game with a friend. There are other things I am proud to have done like my band pluggers the modular synth I built as a teen, the parts of my anthropology papers that I wrote myself.
I enjoy many things. For example, recently I have really enjoyed playing Resident Evil 2 (remake), and I have spent 20+ hours in that game because I allowed myself to enjoy it, though last time I played it the thoughts of assignments and things to do, did interfere with my enjoyment. I guess the game became a form of escapism. Me trying to get away with doing something I love. This made me come up with a system this morning. I wanted to set myself a "goal" of like say 2 hours a day, where I have guilt free entertainment/relaxation time which I could use for playing games, watching youtube, watching shows, whatever. But the caveat being that that is my only "self relaxation" time. Throughout the day then I would also set a minimum of say 1 hour of school work and 1 hour of senior project work and continue like that, but I know in me that it wouldn't work. It just sounds good. On paper it sounds great, but I am not the kind of person to follow that kind of regime, at least I don't think I am. I like doing things on a whim, I guess. Doing university work only to pass basically, whilst still extracting anything that I find particularly important or useful.
I just quickly wanted to write a little tangent about YouTube and how watching it affects me. That is, when I watch youtube I often find myself in a cycle of finding a topic that I find fascinating, say computer graphics, games programming, other languages like C, and then spending a few hours researching and watching stuff about the topic, only to then never do anything within that topic. It is like an extreme procrastination technique because in the moment it feels like you are not really procrastinating.
Jonathan Blow put it quite simply like: You will do the work you want to do. So, all of this procrastinating doesn't at all mean that I want to do any of the things I am watching. Maybe that means I should take a step back and reassess what I truly want to do.
Where does that leave me? I don't fucking know.