I’ve gone down a hyperfocus hole these past two days about finding a cheap, handheld Linux terminal device. I was dreaming about setting up a terminal-only environment on it, with things like a Beeper client, a git repo for text notes, little python scripts, drafting logs here and posts for my website.

I think what draws me to this idea is a feeling that the little apps and utilities in a Unix system are like little creatures, with personalities and quirks and behaviors that I can interact with. These software-creatures are easier, because while they have personalities to make them interesting and they “talk back” to me, they are clearly defined, knowable. I can get to know them and be confident that I know what buttons to push to get what results.

In real life it’s not so easy. Real humans are not so thoroughly knowable, they are squishy and large and complex inside, real people are infinite. That’s scary, so I try to retreat to my safe little digital creatures. I look for this in places like tilde.town, as well as in regular smartphone apps and little obsessions like the current one. I want my safe, finite, controllable digital creatures, that I can puzzle out and then once I did, I can know them forever.

I tend to jump head first into rabbit holes/hyperfocus holes on ideas of vague enjoyment and coolness instead of specific, practical usecases. Like, say I get myself a BlackBerry Q5/10/20, set up Term49, set up BerryMuch and now I have a handheld Unix-y device. (I spent the last two days looking this up, so I’m confident this would actually work.) But now what?

The problem is that I don’t start with a problem to solve, a set of things I want to do but don’t have a good way to. Like would I really write Python scripts on the bus or at a cafe with this? I don’t write Python scripts now on my laptop at home, so why would being “on the go” make me do this suddenly? Same with communication. I don’t chat to many people now on my iPhone and laptop, just having a weird terminal-based chat application won’t change that.

The tool is not the answer.

And here is the crux of my problem: instead of defining my problems properly, thinking through to their source and addressing that, I run to picking up a new tool (phyisical or virtual) as a shortcut. I feel overwhelmed and disconnected from my whole self at times? Let’s make a new website, that’ll solve it. I feel disconnected from people? Let’s buy a new gadget and spend days setting it up as an esoteric text based system, that will solve it.

Usually what happens, is I get the tool, set it up, tinker with it in and increasingly desperate and obsessive way, and then when it’s done, I sit there and don’t have anything to do on it. At the end of the day, I do the things I do already, regardless of what device or software I have in hand. I will behave the same, feel the same on an iPhone, a Linux laptop or a BlackBerry hacked to run Unix applications.

I will scroll mindlessly, on Facebook or the obscure Gopher protocol, but I’ll scroll just the same. I scroll, I tinker, I obsess and that’s all a great distraction from the fact that life is hard and scary and fundamentally unknowable. I’m like a toddler handing on to his pacifier for dear life for protection. The pacifier might make him feel better a bit, but it’s just a piece of plastic and rubber, it won’t protect him from the world. The world is here, all around, whether I cling to my little piece of plastic and rubber or not.