The Good Kind of Exhaustion | Newsletter #40

Luke Simmons's Fortieth Personal Newsletter

Introduction

Today marks the first of (hopefully) many newsletters of a new format.

I want to experiment around a bit. But, most newsletters will follow a similar format as this one.

I also want to shout out my friend Madeline’s newsletter Snack for Thought as a huge inspiration behind this new format. She does an excellent job at sharing her life in both a clean and fun way.

Now, with all that information stated, here’s the format for today.

• What I’ve Created

• What I’ve Consumed

• What went Well

• What went Wrong

• What I’m Taking Away

Let’s begin.

What I’ve Created

• Reddit knockoff

• Personal Website Rehall/Redesign

• Boredom Thought Piece

Reddit Knockoff. I’ve been working on Not-Reddit for several weeks now as one of my final projects for Codecademy. The site itself was built using React.js utilizing JSX and React Toolkit quite a bit. I also got to learn a ton about Reddit API as all of the information is taken directly from Reddit. I’m really proud of the result and I feel even more proud of the amount of learning I did through it.

You can check out the site for yourself here or see the GitHub page here.

Personal Website Rehall/Redesign. As I learn more and more about web design, the more ways open up to improve my own website. As you may know, I first designed this website as the final project for my web design module in Praxis (more info here). I built it using very basic HTML and CSS. As such, things like ease of updating and performance were quite low. So, this week I decided to make the big jump to switch the entire website to React. This didn’t take as much time as I suspected and the result was beyond worth it. For reference, performance jumped from around a 50% score to now 100% on both mobile and desktop.

Besides technical updates, I also took the chance to update the aesthetics. I changed the color palette, added some much-needed polish, and even some animations. Overall, I’m really happy with where my website is at right now.

You can check it out for yourself here or see the GitHub page here.

Boredom Thought Piece. As mentioned in the previous newsletter, outside of these weekly updates I want to write more thoughtful articles on specific topics that pique my interest. This week, the topic that struck my mind was boredom. I won’t go into too much detail here, so you’ll have to read the article to get my full thoughts. But, my main point is that boredom is a much more complex and impactful issue than it may seem. Your view of it impacts how you live your life in a very unique way.

I’m now beginning to put together a list of topics that I’d like to write about in future articles. So keep your eye out!

You can read the full post here.

What I’ve Consumed

• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

• An enormous amount of Sherlock Holmes

Four Thousand Weeks. This book has been one of the best books I’ve read this year. The insights into how damaging our view of time is have been beyond helpful to me. The premise of the book is that our view of time and productivity is ultimately counter-productive and only makes us more stressed and overwhelmed.

For example, the latest chapter I read spoke about impatience. The point Burkeman makes is that impatience is ultimately motivated by our desire to control time, which is inherently impossible for humans. Impatience is really a pointless grab at the Divine. Thus, we need to surrender our pride and submit to the reality that we don’t control time, time controls us.

Once I finish the book, I’m going to collect my thoughts and write an entire discussion for you all to enjoy.

Sherlock Holmes. There’s not much to say regarding this, except that I’m thoroughly enjoying it. This has been my therapeutic escape for a number of weeks. Whenever I’m feeling stressed or anxious, I just put on some jazz music and escape to some dark part of Great Britain with the quick-witted detective to solve some great tragedy.

I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a nice escape from the stresses of daily life.

What went Well

• Made a lot of progress on web development

• Got a strong start on my thought pieces

• Minimized my YouTube time to less than 30 minutes a day

• Read over 100 pages across various books

• Had a lovely conversation with my Grandad

• Woke up at 4 am or 6 am every day

• Felt exhausted at the end of the day

This week was a lot of things, but I must say that there is one phrase that sums it up best.

Exhausting in the best way.

Each and every day I felt like I had spent all my energy on the things I needed to.

Taking the principles I’ve learned from Four Thousand Weeks, I saw each day not as a resource to spend, but as an independent experience. There is no way to wrongly spend your day as there is no way to spend your day at all. You simply live it.

What went Wrong

• Work was stressful and irritating

• Spend some money on things I didn’t need

• Fostered a lot of lies in my mind

• Didn’t check in on any friends

These are all things I wish didn’t happen. But, I’m trying to see them more as lessons than anything else.

Shoutout to my friend Josh as well for constantly checking in on me and making sure I don’t isolate myself too badly.

What I’m Taking Away

• Stop thinking of time as something you own and therefore can waste or use

• Keep YouTube time down and reading time up

• Feeling exhausted at the end of the day is a wonderful blessing and a sign that you’re working well

• Don’t isolate, keep up with friends, and check in on them regularly

• Keep learning and working on web development and you’ll end up somewhere awesome

Overall, a great week for progress and reaching a lifestyle with minimal stress.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this new format of things! Please let me know if you have any suggestions or critiques about it.

As always, I will write to you again next week.

God bless,

-Luke