I don’t know the details of the military demonstrations, but singing in a choir as a kid in front of hundreds of parents is exactly the kind of scary thing with no actual danger that can really help kids grow and conquer fears.

So, my middle aged ass plays the microtransaction-laden bullshit known as Roblox because my 3rd grader and all his friends love it.

It doesn’t even have a Linux version but thanks to the project “sober” it plays absolutely fantastically on Linux. I think they claim 2x the performance of the windows version. I just know I have a powerful but old system (8c/8t 9700k cpu and gtx1080 gpu) and I can lock it at 144fps at 1440p and it uses like 20% of my system resources. Not that it’s a visually demanding game, lol.

Going all-in on my switch to Linux (my win10 partition for dual booting lasted less than two weeks) has had zero negative impact on my ability to play the games I want. In fact, it has led to me using my PC a lot more and my phone a lot less. Feels good.

A few rapid fire ideas.

Don’t rule out medication. It can be the thing that lets you get over the first hurdle so you see what it’s like on the other side.

Go for variety. I’m a software engineer but I am doing very physical and mechanical things in the evenings, at least until winter. Then I can do some tech shit

Be intentional with your time and resources. Think about what benefits the journey of your project will have for your personal well being. Being conscious of the benefits of an activity lowers the the threshold for the effect of “just push through and then you get used to working on it and keep going and now it’s your hyper focus.”

Own your decisions and keep them to yourself at first if you have to. If it’s a hobby you’re interested in, you will probably do a good job learning and you will produce good results, and that will help build the kind of deep fundamental confidence that you can’t just decide to have.

I am very much an ADHD + Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria type. There’s a related issue called Avoidant Personality Disorder. I have gone nuts on my conduction projects for my hobbies without constantly including family and friends like is typical in my circles when doing big yard projects.

So while my advice inevitably will not work for everybody – we’re all different and we have to reverse engineer our own brain & body manuals – hopefully some of this will make sense in this case.

That’s the trick though, especially as you get older. The stuff that sounds like an awesome relaxing reset and will surely be nice at the time, is not always the activity that will actually leave you feeling better afterwards.

A frustrating example is being tired in the middle of the day on a weekend when I wanted to be productive in my hobbies & house work. If I take a nap, will that save me evening or ruin my evening?

There’s a lot of trial and error, since we’re all different.

W A LD O