I recently learnt the basic of rust by using an interactive version of the rust book and rustling, a super helpful tutorial repo that helps you consolidate your understanding of knowledge learnt for the rust book. I use them side by side and I managed to figure out most of the concepts in two days, which is quiet a step for a complex language like rust.
The entire learning experience was highly rewarding. The tutorials and the book were meticulously crafted, making complex concepts easily penetrable. As I delved deeper, I began to appreciate the thoughtful design of the language, features like the seamless integration of enum and match makes the error handling a smooth experience. The more I interacted with the code, the more I admired the ingenuity of its creators. Rust, indeed, is a remarkable language, and I am delighted to add it into my skillset.
Subsequently, I devoted considerable time to solving LeetCode problems using Rust and reading through Rust project codebases, in hope that I cam master it fast and ready to contribute to the open source projects that I enjoyed for so long such as rnote and zellij.
However, my motivation for learning Rust wasn't purely justified. I honestly know that I was grappling with anxiety related to my thesis and found myself using Rust as an escape. I had mismanaged my time last week, and the resulting stress made it nearly impossible for me to focus on my primary task — I can barely set down, open my editor and start coding. The more time I spent on Rust, the more my anxiety escalated.
Moreover, I began to critique my own code quality more harshly, I also dislike python more for aspects that are not as good designed as rust. My perfectionism started undermining the effort I'd put into my main project, further discouraging me from focusing on my primary tasks. After struggling for two days, I recognized this pattern of behavior as a manifestation of my perfectionism and anxiety, both of which I've traced back to my struggle with pornography addiction, a topic I plan to cover in a separate blog post.
Confronting the truth was hard, but it spurred me to take a different course of action. Instead of remaining glued to my screen, I swapped to my jogging clothes and took a run around Gundelfingen, a small town near Freiburg where I've lived for the past two months. Without any navigation, I let the town's rough contours in my head guide my route. The endocannabinoid system, activated by jogging, gradually pulled me out of the despair I was trapped in. By the time I returned home, I felt anew. Although the anxiety about my pending work persisted, this time I can face it.
Writing this blog is also part of action against my problem. Writing and rewriting is a much more difficult, yet stable source of pleasure than surfing YouTube. The more I can engage in such activity, the better I can recover from the dopamine deficiency resulted from my addiction.
This cycle of falling into an unmotivated state, recovering, and then falling back again has been a recurring theme in my life for over a decade. It's a formidable enemy that I've yet to conquer. In the past, all I could do was delay the inevitable, not even knowing what I am facing, not to mention the way to fight it. However, as I've grown and gained more self-knowledge and understanding of the world, I slowly come to a point to have the tools necessary to launch a fight against this problem and right now I’m planning to end this cycle for good.
After all, it's simply a matter of addiction.