I agree that often certain hobbies require a push to get started. That initial barrier is what I found the hardest to overcome, but once you start going - it becomes easier and easier. Similar to how one can attempt to overcome moments of procrastination - you need to get started and push through initial discomfort.
But it may start out feeling like a diet for the mind, that I am willing to believe. But like with a healthy diet you’ll benefit immensely over time. But it requires discipline.
I slept pretty well and feel healthy and energized today and doing the dishes was easy this morning, but it's totally contrary to my entire life experience to claim that doing something physically tiring gives you more energy afterward.
Not that doing nothing all the time feels good— humans just don't have unlimited capacity for output. Taking a leisurely morning walk (or a moderate-distance bike commute) certainly gets my day started on the right foot, but going harder faster longer at physical activity makes me physically tired and less capable of doing other things.
A great exercise would be to find some causality from Strava data and git commit, both of which I have fairly extensive data on.
Pushing the limits of a body is sitting in a chair for 8 hours, barely moving, in stead of walking around doing stuff with your hands, taking a swim, climbing a tree picking some nuts.
We should make no mistakes about what the natural actions and states of our minds and bodies are.
Exhausted or not, you’re probably more likely to come across something unexpectedly and write it down than remember them all and offer up something fitting from memory.
This may hold for activities like programming, where every decision follows almost logically from the previous ones. But if you're doing really hard research, with setback after setback, then it's much harder to "ignite" a work appetite.
It isn’t just getting going makes the project (hobby) easier.
It is the ability to organize the project into small steps that are relatively easy and yield novel artifacts.
Giving light structure to a hobby or side project (such as using GitHub issues even if it doesn’t involve code) let’s you pick up where you left off and see the incremental progress.
This administration is a practice of itself but the more you do it, the more natural it feels and easier it becomes to see progress.
Isn't this just a problem in trying to reduce the phenomenal experience of self into some objective reality, a quest that reduces to something adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness.
My browser history is now filled with "chill or relaxing games", "games that don't need thinking" or something to that effect.
> don’t need thinking
You seem to be seeking proxies for the effect of not thinking, putting your mind and body at ease, and letting go. Have you given meditation a try? Anecdotally, it can fulfill these needs in a way no other semi-conscious activity seems capable.
As a sibling comment says, ego depletion research is pretty low quality in terms of reproducibility. Anecdotally, I have never found it to be true for me.
> ...I guarantee you'll feel drained.
You'd lose that bet. Maybe you are, I however find writing code just as interesting and invigorating as I did over a decade ago in university. I do it at work, I do it in my free time both for purpose and for fun.
I understood your point, you're just incorrect. Different people are different, which was my point.
Now that we have that out of the way, I have to ask; are you ok? You seem really invested in this idea that programming is some kind of exhausting, herculean endeavor and that anyone who is a real coder must be exhausted at the end of a day of coding. That is not normal. If you don't enjoy your job I strongly recommend that you look around. Programming is a super valuable skill and I'm sure you can find a job that's more inline with your life.
Now as a CTO at a YC startup, I've created an environment where devs have good work/life balance, time off is encouraged, engineering has significant say and sway on product decisions, etc., but this is by no means the industry norm.
On the infosec side, the industry norm seems to be infosec is largely consolidating as the industry switches to outsourcing everything to public clouds (read: disappearing), and what remains is pretty relaxed unless you are chasing bounties all day, which is typically a self-driven situation. Penetration tests for example seem to have longer timelines these days even though most of the tools are now automated (our startup just went through SOC-2, and I can tell you from the server logs almost all the checks on our staging server happened in the last 72 hours of the evaluation period). My assumption is for the other 26 days of the evaluation they are indeed playing call of duty, and so it goes for the whole infosec industry.
Low starting effort. Mise en place.
I have similarly found that all of my activities are not things you can do when you're recovering from food poisoning and have massive thick brain fog all day. So I got into gardening, cooking and then baking, improving my own work clothing and putting up shelves around the kitchen and house.
And walking alone. Which is amazing, if you leave your phone at home.
In contrast, a lot of games feel like work - guess where you're supposed to go or how to solve a problem, fail due to some trivial mistake, retry many times.
Very true. But changing your lifestyle to a high degree is about turning the activities that you like into these “passive activities” like going for a morning run doesn’t feel like something you need to mentally or even physically exert yourself to do for someone who does it regularly 4 times a week.
That's not the case in my experience. After a full day managing teams, solving problems and coding, I find it "relaxing" to do a physically and mentally challenging instructor/coach-led activity.
For me, that means swimming, water polo or other team sport, dance classes learning a complex choreography, etc.
It's relaxing switching off the "I'm in charge" part of my brain, while still getting the flow and enjoyment of improving a skill, especially with others in a non-tech environment.
If you've been pushing yourself hard at work all day, then you have likely depleted your will power. Passive activities become the only ones you feel like doing.