Forever Out Of Time

I find myself constantly somewhere between the past and the future. That seems like a given, right? What I mean is that my mind is perpetually thinking about the past and everything that has happened and how it affects any number of possible futures that I feel are most likely to occur. That’s how I perceive things about “the future.” I take all given variables and estimate based on previous experiences and generate a set of potential futures in my head and mentally explore them as far as I can within the bounds of what I can reasonably infer. From there as time moves forwards, variables are updated and the probability percentages adjust between the different futures that I see. This leads to something called “analysis paralysis” where I get so bogged down by all the details and potential futures that I am frozen and unable to let myself make a decision because I’m not confident enough in the outcome. The other downside to this is that it’s difficult for me to “let go” of things that happened in the past because it’s data that my brain uses to extrapolate and adjust potential future probabilities.

I try to limit myself to a few main futures at a time, but sometimes a few less-probable futures creep in there and contribute to my paralysis. The worst part about extrapolation is that it is susceptible to my emotions, particularly my fears and insecurities. However, if I feel like I either don’t have time to think about something directly, then I will just let it sit in my subconscious until it presents an updated answer to something. In which case the answer comes in the form of a dream or a sudden, seemingly random thought.

My brain is constantly going. Constantly checking variable. Constantly spewing out random ideas concerning various fields such as design, animations (of the UI/UX variety in particular), space, technology, physics, quantum mechanics, or any combination thereof. I take inspiration from movies, video games, social media, and my dreams. I have this infinite flood of ideas on how to iterate on other people’s work as well as create my own. Some ideas are as simple as apps or watch faces, or as complicated as designing a HUD for anyone to use anywhere. I just lack the base knowledge to do anything at this moment.

Learning what I need to know takes time. I’m stuck for 40+ hours a week (8+ hours a day) at work and can’t make any progress there. Then the other large portion that’s taken up is sleep (4 to 8 hours a night). So that leaves about 10 hours a day for everything else. That includes eating, maybe working out, household chores (trash, dishes, laundry, etc.), showering, social media, and hanging out with my girlfriend. And that doesn’t even account for homework during the semesters (which I will hopefully be done with soon). That’s really not a lot of time left to work on anything of worth, much less learn anything new that I could use. And that’s why it’s taking me weeks longer to release my first watch face, ISAC v1, onto the Pebble store.

This all contributes to the overarching theme of how I feel most of the time. I feel like I’m out of time. I feel like I’m somehow behind where I’m supposed to be in life. It’s like seeing your ghost car from racing games ahead of you and not being able to catch it. The feeling of knowing that it’s possible, yet it never quite happens is frustrating and annoying to say the least. I know all of this was a little ambiguous, but it couldn’t be any other way since my thought processes apply to many different things and can’t necessarily be funneled down for specific examples.