Hey,

I am an electrical engineer, but a natural at coding so after I got my degree I was quickly pushed by my employer towards more programming related projects. I was pretty good at it, but I suffered from similar issues as you. The race seems never ending and there’s always a new thing to know just around the corner, with seemingly no space or time to learn stuff in depth or create a decent and understandable architecture and documentation. I also really missed the social and emotional aspect, which seemingly is not how all people function: a lot of my colleagues were perfectly content to spend 8 hours a day racing through libraries and editors and calling it a day. In the end I got a pretty severe depression and anxiety (those issues were already underlying but the work triggered them again). It took a long time to start recovering again, but now I feel OK most days and I have beautiful moments and value in life. After a period of therapy I started volunteering as a bike repairman parttime (as this is the only workload I could handle) and that was really nice. Now I actually started studying again to become a librarian or work in another function for public information and I feel that it suits me well at the moment. No one can tell what the future will bring, the librarian thing might work out or it might not, but there is always something new to do. Don’t spend your life trying to be someone you’re not. Don’t try to do what you’d love to be, try to love what you are.

This got a bit serious, but this seems like a safe space to do so :).

I totally agree. What we perceive around us is the reality we are trying to understand. A simulation is by definition a copy or simplified version of something occuring in reality. Describing our reality as a simulation is just meaningless, as it just somehow moves the definition of reality as “something above or beyond what we can experience”. That is not useful and makes me think of flying spaghetti monster stuff.