What you (don’t) get from an open source project
I’d like to talk about balancing volunteer involvement in an open source project versus personal well-being. This balancing act is a lot harder than it seems, because up to a certain point an OSS project will do nothing but add do your well-being rather than subtract from it. And it can also be adding so much that when it does start subtracting from other parts of your well-being, you don’t notice it. You tend to not notice until it subtracts more than it adds, and at that point it can be hard to break the habit.
Is there a way to notice earlier? Maybe, but frankly I don’t know. Let me just tell a story of my own experience from 10 years back and let you draw from that whatever you might find useful.
The bliss of finding ones peers
I came upon Warcraft 3 modding and eventually jMonkeyEngine during a mild depression. I had transitioned from elementary school (ages 6–15 in Norway) where everything was easy, to high school (16–18) where everything was hard. Finding new friends, learning yet more of the same things, coming up with a career path, obsessing over the girl…, it was just too much.
Game development was my lifeline, and a really strong one at that. Here I had like-minded friends, super interesting topics and a possible career path all wrapped into one. No strong leads on a SO but 3/4 in one package was already one heck of a deal.
The lies we tell ourselves
For a while this was great, but eventually I was regularly staying up until 5am and skipping the majority of my classes — I lived away from home so there was no one to drag me out of bed. I told myself it had to be this way because my main collaborator was US-based and this was the only time we could actively collaborate, but in truth most of the work we were doing together could easily be done asynchronously. The main reason I was staying up late was because I didn’t want yet another day to begin. Starting a new day meant once again being faced with all the “regular life” things that I was actively failing to do.
My full-time hobby had taken me up one notch on the well-being scale, but I was still depressed, just a bit less so than before. A weird and mostly-great thing about our psyche is that it keeps raising the bar for what an acceptable state of being is. So once I had settled into a slightly improved situation, I found myself feeling empty once again.
This story has repeated itself many times over in my life, though with increasingly longer intervals as I continue to learn more about my needs and how to best fulfil them at no (or even positive) cost to anyone else. While my road to recovery tends to happen in a very round-about way — like traveling somewhere far away, switching careers, taking improv classes — the remedy is ultimately the same each time: Finding time and opportunity to form deep connections with other people. Sometimes this means making new connections, but more often it means rekindling and deepening the existing connections I already have with the people around me.
The thing about online connections
Open source is by and large digital, and I do believe the advent of online relationships have been both a blessing and a curse, especially for introverts like myself. There’s no inherent problem with online relationships that make them inferior to their offline counterparts, other than the fact that (1) online communication is still so new that we sometimes lack the necessary tools to efficiently form the deepest possible connections we desire from other human beings, plus (2) we have yet to fully master the tools at our disposal. That, plus our fleshy-containers-of-consciousness have certain physiological needs programmed into them that, to the best of our current knowledge, can only be satisfied by occasionally being in close proximity to other fleshy-containers-of-consciousness in a safe setting.
I firmly believe that the internet brings more good than bad, even now. But as open source contributors it’s safe to assume that we’ve all got a pretty good handle on making connections on the internet. That leaves our offline connections with more room for improvement. But by all means always pursue greater depth in any social connection, regardless of medium.
If I’m gonna insert any subjective advice of my own in here, let it be this:
That open source project cannot possibly fulfil all your needs. If you attempt to make it so you risk corrupting the heaps of good it can bring you if combined with other healthy activities, some of which really ought to be offline and outside of the open source sphere altogether.
After I learned all this, and what it means for us all, I started to long for the power to go back in time and speak to my teenage self on the day he was told a story about his depression that was going to send him off in the wrong direction for so many years. I wanted to tell him: “This pain you are feeling is not a pathology. It’s not crazy. It is a signal that your natural psychological needs are not being met. It is a form of grief — for yourself, and for the culture you live in going so wrong. I know how much it hurts. I know how deeply it cuts you. But you need to listen to this signal. We all need to listen to the people around us sending out this signal. It is telling you what is going wrong. It is telling you that you need to be connected in so many deep and stirring ways that you aren’t yet — but you can be, one day.”
If you are depressed and anxious, you are not a machine with malfunctioning parts. You are a human being with unmet needs. The only real way out of our epidemic of despair is for all of us, together, to begin to meet those human needs — for deep connection, to the things that really matter in life.
p.s. I do not have any experience with antidepressants and can only relate to Johann Hari’s case for making deeper connections, not his stance on medication, for which there are opposing views (1)(2).
