Matthew Gates https://notetoservices.com 2m 607
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
A Story Of Me In Likely Relation To You
My Job Feeds My Internet Addiction
When I was younger, I was addicted to video games, Nintendo, N64, Sega, Xbox. (Sorry, I wasn’t a Playstation guy). Then I turned to computer games, specifically a game called Subspace (now Continuum — a 2D Star Wars style space ship game) and Asheron’s Call, where I spent more time in this than I did in high school, and happened to be the first character on the Harvestgain server to max out all my skills (with lots of people around to watch my rainbows shoot out from my avatar).
Very brief child history: I wasn’t always an introvert but the way others treated me forced me to be. I enjoyed playing tag football outside with my friends, going to the park, etc. Then the gaming systems came along and the Internet came along, and I slowly began to retreat into a world where I felt I had more control over things, where I could be anonymous, where I could even have another name if I wanted to, and where other people happened to be.
During my teenager years, I also got addicted to making little programs in Visual Basic 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0. Usually interacting with others, specifically AOL (America Online for those of you who are too young to even know that life — 28k 56k! Omg… 4 hours to download a song and longer for …. well let’s just keep it PG, but actually, porn is the likely culprit responsible for why fast Internet was developed) My addiction was really just being on the Internet.
I then attempted to escape the world of computers, went to college for Psychology, where my Internet addiction became easy to manage, but I still had to feed it, as most of my hours were spent on a computer writing papers. However, I blocked myself a lot from being on social media.
But after college… I went and applied for jobs… jobs that required me dealing with people rather than being on the Internet. But… no jobs hired me. Secretly, as a deeply rooted introvert, with experience to pretend to have extrovert qualities in short doses, I turned to a skill that I learned when I was younger.. programming.
A company that developed an application in Visual Basic 6.0 needed to keep supporting it and so they hired me — to fix bugs and new features. A tyrant boss led me astray and I got another job in web design, where my future would lie.
I am currently “doing” web design as my day job and have been for the past 7 years, and as a side hobby / side business, I develop SaaS web apps. There is this part of me that struggles knowing that my livelihood is my addiction, and that my side hobby, other than occasional biking and hiking and travelling, is also my addiction, but really, there might be no place I’d rather be when it comes to work, because in a way, I’m content with my addiction. I get a constant feed of dopamin, seratonin, endorphins, and oxytocin for most of my day.
I just became good at the Internet. Living on it. Surviving on it. Making money from it. And so.. that’s where I am. I leave my job, where I’m on the Internet all day, only to hop back on the Internet, in an attempt to find other ways to make a living. Maybe that is my addiction: money? Ways to find ways to secure money?
Feels like we’re not much different from being inside the Matrix.
Source: https://www.indiehackers.com/@mgates/my-job-became-my-addiction-bb7db2dc83
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