Yoyuu

Had a conversation recently where this word came up. 余裕 - yoyuu, meaning "slack, margin, flexibility" - https://jisho.org/word/%E4%BD%99%E8%A3%95

It's a Japanese word, but I'm not trying to say "it's this cool Japanese concept with a special word for it, that creates its own philosophy". Just that this word specifically makes the right associations come up for me. I would call it "slack" in English and "свобода" in Russian.

The context was extra slack in our lives. If your calendar is full and you barely have any free time, there's to slack. There's no extra space in your life for all the fun. I'm feeling it in my life, and it's kind of paradoxical because I do have a lot of free time. So I'm not sure why this resonates so much with me.

Maybe it's my current living circumstances. Maybe it's just being in a big city. Maybe it's burning all my free time on pointless entertainment (probably that). But there's something that "pulls" all my free time, tightening the metaforical string of my life and not leaving me any "slack".

When slack's present, it feels like wasted time, especially if you're usually stressed. When I'm so used to optimizing my life in some ways, I'm removing all the slack from it. Going home from work? Better hurry up! Those extra two minutes will surely be important. Meanwhile I get tired and spend half an hour resting without energy, because I walked so fast I was almost running. Walking again? Better have a podcast in my ears, now I'm not "wasting" the walking time, I'm also listening to the podcast, it's two birds with one stone. Oh, and if the podcast is in Japanese, it's even better!

I'm mixing concepts here, but I don't care, these are "pour my thoughts into the screen" posts.

For life in general it becomes "I have a Japanese lesson today, then work, then plans to hang out with a friend, then other plans". And when I do have extra time, all the "startup" is too slow. I can go to a gallery or something, but I have to go there physically. I can revisit my programming projects, but I have to "boot up" my internal sense of it. I can watch a movie, but I need to pay attention.

So instead it's a podcast or a stream again, and a mindless game that just kills time.

I think this post was supposed to be about something else. Now it's just me whining about my life, same as 10 years ago.

It's just that I took a survey and it basically said "wow, your lifestyle is so boring, nobody cares". There was a comment that it might not be that representative for geeks. But still.

I should just talk to people. And I should stop saying "should".

Today I showed my OCR project to people and it made me want to improve it. It's better to focus on things like that.