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Action and reaction. Fire and force. In order to soar in one direction, a rocket has to burn furiously against the space it wishes to leave behind.
I’m a lover, not a fighter. I’ve always been a little miffed that my country’s anthem-choosers went with “bursting in air” over “sea to shining sea”. The shining seas are really nice. Bursting is…upsetting.
I remember sitting in classrooms and being told about taxation without representation. About people who were tired of giving so much to a king who cared so little about what they really needed, people who chose to risk what stability they had to fight for something better. And the story always seemed unreal to me, a touch too epic and yet a little too simple, like a fairy tale. Or a koan. Or a parable.
And it was too simple. A 2016 Google search demolishes the distortions and oversimplifications of a 1996 textbook. There was deep loyalism and colonial infighting and there were issues of distance and time and administrative friction and there was religious fervor and exclusion and there were countless tortured slaves and slaughtered indigenous people casting ugly shadows all over the Founders’ stated ideals.
There was also the fact that the colonies were doing alright by themselves in the years leading up to 1776. Why revolt when life isn’t revolting?
But anyway, I’ve been thinking about how rockets work.
So there’s this game called Just Cause 3, and it’s basically GTA meets James Bond meets Batman meets Tropico. You push various buttons in various sequences to make uber-badass Rico Rodriguez run and drive and fly around a sun-soaked archipelago that cowers under a dictator’s iron fist, and you shoot this and blow up that and grapple-tether those two other things into a collapsing heap and rinse and repeat until a town is liberated.
And then you liberate all the towns in a province. And then you liberate all the provinces in a region. If you were wearing a tan shirt instead of a blue shirt, you’d say “conquer” instead of “liberate”. You’re not really a good guy here, so much as the most violent person in the world, whose violence happens to oppose the violence to which most other people in that world have resigned themselves.
The game’s creators understand this grey area they’ve put you in. It’s right there in the name.
For what did you blow up everything in that police station?
A just cause.
And why did you tether a deer to the back of a stolen sports coupe and use it to sideswipe that military motorcycle at 160 km/h while shouting “meat nunchucks, baby!”?
Just ’cause.
The game gives you an unlimited supply of remote mines; you stick a few to a statue of the Evil Bad Tyrant Dictator Guy, grapple up to a rooftop for a better view, trigger the explosion. After enough mayhem, you unlock rocket boosters on the mines, and you can stick them to the back of an empty car, set them off, and watch them propel the car forward (towards the entrance to a heavily-guarded base, perhaps) before detonating after a few seconds.
Fire and force. Action and reaction.
To push forward, you have to put things behind you.
And I’m writing this post so I can hear myself admit to myself that there are things in my life that I am afraid to put behind me, because I’m afraid of moving forward.
I’ve been doing alright by myself, more than alright by any modern standard, but I don’t feel free at all.
In the wide world outside the video game, where my potential for movement and exploration far exceeds the 400 square miles of Rico’s sandbox, I still find myself on the couch, dutifully spending another weeknight living out someone else’s power fantasy. I’ve used a helicopter to hit the ceiling of the game’s skybox, just to see if I could, but there are streets in my own neighborhood that I’ve never set foot on.
I spend 7 hours a week on a train to or from work. 28 hours a month. 330 a year. Between right now and when I’m nearing retirement age, I could potentially spend 10,000 hours getting better at any number of things. All I’d have to do is quit zoning out on Twitter, stop hate-reading bad editorials or idly browsing deal sites, and maybe open a book or a notepad instead.
I get 90 minutes to eat lunch. I keep telling myself I’ll bring my Maschine to work and spend 60 of them figuring out how to make music on it. Instead I hop online again and drink at the bottomless content trough while overeating McDonalds and trying to convince myself that what I’m doing is self care.
I have four waking hours every weekday that aren’t devoted to work or commuting, and my daughter gets one of them, and dinner gets another, so how the hell am I making time to keep up with multiple shows on Netflix and Hulu?
I am losing too much time and energy to things that don’t have my best interests at heart.
I am being taxed without representation. By myself.
And I’ve consented to this taxation. I love these shiny toys that eat up my free time and stall my creative drive. And Twitter is dope. And Mickey D’s is delicious.
I am the tyrant king of an island nation of one, and I’ve spent a year caring so little about what I really need that I’ve almost forgotten what it is.
But I haven’t forgotten completely. I’ve tasted better food before. And I used to have more conversations with real people, and no one ever got cut off at 140. And there was a time not that long ago when I made my own toys, created my own worlds to fly around in, wrote my own stories, told my own story.
I put all of that behind me for a good reason: I needed to move very far, very quickly, in a new direction.
Two years ago, over the course of an exceptionally frantic and joyful summer, I moved to Chicago and learned how to build beautiful and meaningful things on the web. It was a lot to learn, perhaps too much for the time I had given myself to learn it. Tyrants set high bars for success.
But I learned it anyway, by casting aside everything else. No TV, just restorative sleep. No hate-reads, just reflective writing. No vidya, just code and code and code and code. I had left my wife and daughter in another state, and some days I forgot to call them to check in.
I was a rocket, and my trajectory was true, and that meant there had to be a million directions I wasn’t going.
I graduated and stumbled into the most challenging and rewarding and fulfilling job I’ve ever worked, and for a while it felt like I had finally arrived.
I mean, on paper, that’s exactly what I did. I don’t have to grind 60 hours to make ends meet anymore. I can afford date nights and pay the sitter a living wage. My work is recognized and appreciated within a community of like minded people whom I admire and respect. I no longer feel like I have to apologize for or explain away my two college dropouts at family functions; they are now prologue to an adventure instead of a tragedy’s motif.
The changes I’ve gone through felt like arrival for quite a while.
But what is arrival to a rocket?
I press R1 and Rico sticks a mine to the top of an unmanned enemy helicopter. In a couple minutes, I’ll have raised enough hell to raise my Heat Level and they’ll call in air support. Someone’s gonna man this chopper and right as they track me down and start opening fire, I plan to press and hold R1, which should trigger the extreme downward pressure of the pre-splosion rockets and cause the chopper to politely “land” before detonating.
Comically, I hope.
And tragically, I realize that I’ve spent the last year and a half doing the same thing to myself. The bladed bird is my creative life, soaring and explosive and hard to control and dangerous, brought to a standstill by a dramatic push to set my future on more solid ground.
But I hadn’t planned for the explosion after, the glut of timekilling consumer joys that would make me forget how good it felt to record something brand new and share it with the world.
In real life, the detonation is agonizingly slow. You ignite the boosters while playing your songs for 50 bucks a night and feeling like the brokest dude who ever conquered the world (or did you liberate it?); a few months later, you’re planning on writing an Internet radio app to help boost album sales for yourself and your artist friends back home; half a year on and you still haven’t put any new music out but it’s cool because you’ll hit 1000 followers soon and you’re getting really good at teaching and the school’s tri-weekly open mics feel like enough of an outlet for that gasping but ever-quieter voice deep inside; another year gone and Aesop Rock’s “Rings” hits your eardrums for the first time and you realize, holy shit, this song is about you. Or at least, it will be if you don’t change your trajectory, find some different stuff to put behind you.
It’s hard to admit, but I used to rap. And sing, and blog, and strum, and fold paper, and cook, and daydream about big stages in faraway places. I used to go to open mics every week and play billed slots on shows every month. I used to spend train rides refining couplets and reshaping clauses. I used to need to restring my guitar five times in a single summer.
And I was flying high, too high to reliably bring enough money home to my family or spend enough time with them when I got there. So I made my plans and set my mind and set my mines and pulled the trigger and found a more down-to-earth way of living.
But something’s bound to burst pretty soon.
And I’m hoping the pastimes to which I once pledged allegiance are still there.
Because I used to be braver than this. I used to be freer than this.
So I’m declaring my independence – from crafting and polishing my image on social media, from refreshing my feed in search of another like or update or aghast quote tweet to get riled up about, from Netflix binges and memorizing Hulu episode release days, from shopping instead of writing, from critiquing instead of practicing, from blowing up digital regimes instead of making the music that helps me stand up to real ones.
I’m declaring independence from trying to love a little bit of everything as a defense mechanism against forcing myself to fight for the few things I really care about. I’m a lover and a fighter. Some bursts are far more upsetting than others.
The easiest way for Rico to bring down a helicopter isn’t to blow it up or shoot it. All he has to do is grapple tether it to the ground and it will crash all on its own. The pilot AI is too rigidly aggressive to adjust to the tether, and it will pull at the line until it collides with earth and bursts into flames.
But humans aren’t coded like that. We can adapt.
So let’s say you were born yearning to soar, but reality has tied you down to an earth bursting with easy but hollow pleasures.
If you choose to stay where you are, you’ll surely rust from the inside out. But if you choose to fly, you’ll never break that tether, and you won’t be able to get as high up as you’d hoped, and changing direction too quickly or pushing too hard on the attack could disturb your vessel’s delicate balance and put an end to everything.
Why would you risk flight? Why would you even play the game at all?
Maybe you would if you had a good enough reason.
Or maybe the game is its own reward, and you’d give it a shot just ’cause you could.
Happy Fourth. Put something behind you so you can battle for something better. And don’t give up the fight.
I graduated Dev Bootcamp in September, and got asked to come back on contract as a junior instructor, and that job became full-time official last month, and that meant I finally got to reunite my family in Chicago, so we’re together again and my career trajectory has changed in a huge way and 2014 was the most amazing year of my adult life.
But that’s not what’s important for today.
What’s important is that my family moved to Lincoln Square, right off the Rockwell Brown Line stop. That matters because the train is at street level at Rockwell, which means I get to see a drama play out every morning that reminds me of my work.
The Rockwell station is just west of its namesake street. A street level station means there’s no bridge over Rockwell, just a track embedded in the asphalt and four big lighted wooden arms that come down when a train’s about to cross; it’s a railroad crossing, and sometimes people get hit at crossings, so there are bells and flashing red every few minutes before Kimball-bound trains slow down into the station. Or before Loop-bound trains arrive at the station, load up, and then cross Rockwell heading east.
The timing matters for this analogy. Kimball trains come through the crossing faster, since they’re decelerating from speed. By contrast, you’ll see and hear the warnings for a Loop train before the train has arrived at the station, before it has slowed down to a stop before the closed crossing, before passengers have boarded.
And I say all this so maybe you’ll think differently about the kind of person who would ignore bells and flashing lights and duck under a descending wooden arm to make their train. Maybe they’re not ignoring a clear danger. Maybe they have enough context to know when there’s no danger at all.
For many DBC students, the beginning of Phase 1 is all loud warnings and descending arms. Day One hits and it’s FULL – intros given, overviews covered, rules communicated, and on top of that there are several code challenges to get through in what amounts to only a few hours of core coding time. It’s hard to get through everything on the first day, and if you don’t, the fullness of the day gives your ego an easy out: “surely tomorrow, when there’s more time to code, I’ll get through the challenges easier.”
And then comes Day Two and the pace actually increases and it’s really easy to feel like you’re already in danger of total challenge/day/program/career/life failure, depending on how loud your inner authoritarian can yell at you from inside your head.
Before Dev Bootcamp, you were really good at something, art or negotiation or electrical engineering or parenting or sales or being a full-time student, and a lot of your identity is wrapped up in that first expertise. Society messages to us that everyone’s supposed to get good at something and then make some money doing it, and we get nervous enough about the money part that we forget to challenge whether that “something” really needs to be singular for anyone. It’s not that you can’t take on a brand new skill as an adult (I’ve personally watched hundreds do it since last May), it’s that no one’s ever explicitly told you that it’s totally normal, it might even be the default path to happiness, so all you’re left with is the sense that you’re struggling and that you’re doing it alone, because who’s ever done anything this crazy before?
Well, your cohort’s doing it, so that makes you feel safer. And you’ve got instructors who did it, and that helps a lot. But inertia is powerful, and when your brain can’t get its daily expected dose of expertise dopamine, two days in a row, it can make you panic all the same.
I’ve seen a few people have to leave DBC. Sometimes the program just doesn’t fit a student’s learning pace, and it hurts to say goodbye, because you still know they’re going to go off and become great coders one day, but you won’t be there to see it. But sometimes a student just hits an emotional wall and shuts down, and it has nothing to do with their technical prowess, it’s all about their courage.
It goes something like this: “I know I’ve already repeated this phase, and I really need to buckle down these next three weeks if I want to pull through. But what if I summon a Herculean effort and I’m still not good enough in time? Maybe it would hurt a little less if I just tapped out now and failed on my own terms. At least then I could retain some sense of control.”
This morning, on my way in, I saw the gate start to come down, and three people took off running to beat it. Two ducked under, and the third decided at the last moment not to chance it.
If the train represents a perceived danger, and the wooden arms are the ego’s defenses against that danger, maybe the difference between those who go for it and those who hedge is in the context. Maybe Runner 3 didn’t know it was a Loop train and that there was plenty of time to duck even after the arm had dropped completely. And maybe the knowledge that DBC is a safe place to learn and make mistakes, the knowledge that you’re surrounded by students and mentors and teachers who have your back and will help you succeed, the knowledge that so many before you have found success here by trusting the process and bringing their whole selves into the struggle…maybe that knowledge will empower you to pick your moment, stare down the train and get yourself where you were trying to go.
However… what if the train represents a path to somewhere awesome, a path you can miss out on traveling if you hesitate for too long? If that’s the case, maybe the arms and bells and lights are the ego’s defenses against personal change, and maybe Runners 1 and 2 weren’t afraid to duck under them because they knew the ego is a vicious liar when it doesn’t want change, and in that context the warnings weren’t warnings at all, they were just excuses.
But that’s not right either. Coding (and, I’m slowly learning, life itself) isn’t about finding the right solutions, it’s about the best solutions available considering the specific situation and the tradeoffs involved. There’s no black and white, just pros and cons and a choice to be made.
And if that’s true, the train is both danger and opportunity. It’s not your death or your salvation, it’s a risk. It might crush you, or it might open its doors and let you change your scenery. But the tricky part is that when the bells start to go off and the lights start to flash, you will need to decide for yourself what the warning means, and you’ll need to act on that decision quickly.
It’s convenient that I ride toward the Loop way more often than I ride toward Kimball, because it gives the analogy another layer. When I hear the bells and see a train barreling westbound toward the tracks, I know ducking the arm would be a stupid risk, not because I’m more likely to get crushed by a westbound train, but because west is not even where I need to go. Hopefully, long before you started DBC, you got at least a kick out of writing code that works; if not, this might not be the right risk for you in the first place.
But that’s hindsight at this point. You’re here now, and you’re uncomfortably new at this, and the work is really hard, and your defensive brain is warning you that you might be in danger. And yet the train that’s endangering you, these challenges, this process, the uncertainty of what comes after, the uncertainty about yourself, is the very reason you left the house in the first place. At this point, you can hold yourself back or push yourself toward the risk.
I don’t know your tradeoffs, so I can’t speak for you. And it’s a scary choice no matter what side you land on. Scary like running through a railroad crossing is scary, because in both cases you’ve grown up being told to never ever chance it: “A career change? At YOUR age? But you’ve got such a good thing going…”
Still, I’ll bet money that while running through a railroad crossing is scary no matter what, one of those runners was more afraid of getting crushed, and two of those runners were more afraid of missing the train.
I graduated Dev Bootcamp in September, and got asked to come back on contract as a junior instructor, and that job became full-time official last month, and that meant I finally got to reunite my family in Chicago, so we’re together again and my career trajectory has changed in a huge way and 2014 was the most amazing year of my adult life.
For me, putting my head down and going for it was the right move.
Duke Greene is Thinking Out Loud. 