Jack Logs Out; or at least tries to.

I can barely believe I’m typing this. I can barely believe I’m typing at all.

I feel burned out and it’s completely pathetic. I have cushy job web development job in the financial services sector. Really I’ve never done a proper days work in my life.

The worse thing that can possibly happen to me during my day is getting the syntax wrong on my scripts.js file and JSHint will throw up an error and my Gulp command will stop. Then I’ll fix the syntax, type Gulp, press enter and carry on until it happens again.

My entire workflow is designed and automated to make everything thing easier for me. A lot like the rest of the world is, as a straight, white, middle class male in a stable, long term relationship with the aforementioned cushy job.

Because I’m good at my job (or I think I’m good at my job until the next time imposter syndrome strikes) I’ve also got a steady stream of fairly lucrative freelance work coming in as well as constantly increasing number of sites to run in my day job.

I also take this work seriously, and find it difficult to switch off from. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past few months I’ve been sat typing at my computer into the early hours of the morning, long after my girlfriend has gone to bed. Or how many times I’ve dreamt about online application forms rendering badly in IE.

And I have the gall to say “oh poor me, I’m so tired.” The only group better off than me in the world is likely to be professional sports people. But they have to deal with being in the public eye, so perhaps I’m also better off than them too.

I don’t even have a point to this, but it’s the first time I’ve felt like writing something that isn’t a tournament report for a long time. And it’s writing that got me here. Before Gulp, Git, CLI’s and SASS, before jQuery, CSS, PHP and HTML; before WordPress; there was an unemployed idiot who wanted to post thing online.

When I’m building sites now, the words I’m using are inconsequential. Most of the time, they’re not even words. They’re ‘copy’ or ‘content’, to be grabbed with a quick CTRL-C, CTRL-V, and then cleaned up as the inevitable formatting issues occur between Microsoft Word and the WYSIWYG.

I was asked to help review a site I was building the other day. To use my ‘journalism’ and my ‘English’ to make sure everything read okay. I hadn’t thought ‘critically’ like that in a long time.

I remembered how much it used to matter. Words are precious, and each one of them should he carefully considered. Why use thirty seven words in the first paragraph when you could use fifteen?

Now fifteen words seem bad for SEO, an inconvenient extra double space to be removed before pressing the big blue publish button.

I’m tired, I walk four-six miles everyday, I eat too much junk food, drink too much coffee, drink too much alcohol, I don’t write enough and I read even less, and I’m so very tired.

And my only way of complaining about it is to write a blog post. And this is all just procrastination. Soon I will log onto my computer, fire up my text editor, type GULP into the CLI and make a syntax error.