by CJ Quines • on
it’s easy to do the hard things
and it’s hard to do the easy things
what does it mean for something to be hard?
i have a day job as a software engineer. compared to the whole population, the number of people who could do exactly my job would be, i dunno, a very small number. but this is also true for, say, people who could staff a checkout at a specific fast food outlet during a very busy hour. which of these is harder? is that a question that even makes sense?
i cannot, unaided, reach something from a shelf that’s more than, say, eight feet away from the ground. i probably never will be able to. but lots of people can, by virtue of being tall. does that mean reaching things from high shelves is hard for me and easy for other people?
i can beat an ascension 20 run of slay the spire in a few tries. the vast majority of people have not even played slay the spire, and i’m sure that it would take a random person several hours to get to my level of skill. does that mean beating ascension 20 is hard?
it takes a lot out of me to do my day job, i think, in a way that it didn’t take a lot out of me to be a student. my perennial complaint seems to be that i come home from work and i don’t have energy to do much else other than eat out with friends or watch something or play video games. and in practice, that’s what i’ve been doing outside of work, for the past few weeks, maybe months. because it’s easy, in the sense that it doesn’t require a lot of energy. or maybe, it’s easy, in the sense that it’s straightforward fun
and as usual there’s a variety of things i could be doing, i could be doing, things that are “easier” in the sense that they require less thinking. but “harder” in another sense, in the sense that summoning energy to do it seems harder. things like reviewing applications, writing blog posts, writing game material, problemsetting, whatever. things i want to do because, because what? because that’s how i view myself?