Boredom is my enemy

How building systems keeps me from being bored for over 10 years.

Tags: survivalPosted on: 2024-07-07

Most people wonder what they want to do as they grow up, what they're good at. I think in my case, I identified technology pretty quickly as the activity I not only enjoyed, but was good at. I've been dabbling in technology from a young age, first as a pastime and then professionally. Lately however, I've narrowed down which segment of the profession I like the most: systems building. I like to design systems, to architecture them and create them, both for work and in my personal life, and I think this passion for building systems is also why I haven't been bored in well over a decade.

What do I mean when I say I like to "design systems"? Let me give you a few examples:

• I like to collect media. Whether that's music, videos, images.. I rather host them locally on my own servers than in the cloud. Most people that are into self-hosting will look for a ready-built solution like Plex or Immich. There's nothing wrong with that, but my first instinct was to ask: What software can I build that will fulfill all the features I need for this use case? And that's what I ended up doing.
• If you enjoy walking, hiking, or doing any outdoors activity, chances are you've tried various tracking apps or methods. Maybe you just keep track of your runs in a spreadsheet. That's a perfectly good solution, but eventually you can discover that doesn't scale very well. A systems builder asks, as soon as the use-case appears: What process can I setup that will give me all the capabilities I need, and is likely to grow successfully over time? I ended up picking a CMS called Directus to track my walks, since it has both tabular capabilities and built-in graphs.
• A last example is my status screen. I had a spare 19" TV that I wasn't using anymore, so the natural question that came to me was: What system can I put in place using this resource that will bring me actual value? I ended up building a status screen, with the TV on the wall, showing me the latest news, weather report, stocks, the status of my homelab, etc.

The point of going through these examples isn't to brag, but to show a bit how my brain works. I'm always thinking ahead, always pondering various projects and use cases. There isn't a day that goes by when I'm not working on at least one side project. To me, this is now a routine, and it's an addictive one. A lot of my projects are tech related, but many of them are simply to improve my day to day life. And they compound, too: Tracking those projects require a good documentation system, so that's also a project that I tackled. Bringing data between various devices can be a pain, so I built a system for that. And so on, and so on..

A lot of people have said at some point: "I'm bored". This is something I genuinely can't relate to. Life is so short, it feels like a crime to spend it being bored, so I do everything I can to stay occupied. Between my hobbies (tech, video games, streaming, reading books, hiking and more) and just a genuine desire to always learn new things, I always feel like I have way more things to do then there are hours in the day, and when I go to bed, I'm thinking about some of the things I'm already planning for the next day.

And again, I'm not writing this because I hold a secret above all others. This didn't happen to me because of talent or luck, it's what happens when you put such a deep focus on building systems. Create a system of documentation, build a project tracker on top of it, then find yourself hobbies and build systems on top of those. Crafting all of those systems will require time, effort, and lead to a great satisfaction, and before you know it, your days will be filled with so many activities that boredom will be a thing of the past. I know it is for me.