I recently realized I’m constantly looking for a fix. Not from an external drug or chemical substance, but from flow. I get flow most commonly from programming, although I’ve felt it before while writing and working out.
It’s scary though because I am constantly hungry for flow. If I haven’t had it in awhile I go looking for it. I browse Hacker News and Reddit Programming looking for new languages and libraries to learn. Recently I picked up Stripe and it provided a fix for awhile, just like Clojure, Hadoop, and other tools and languages before them.
But on some level I feel like an addict. Wikipedia describes addiction as
… a continued involvement with a substance or activity despite the negative consequences associated with it.
Does the lack of (obvious) negative consequences make what feels like an addiction okay? Is the fact that I am constantly learning to try to get into flow make it alright since it makes me better at my software development job? On the surface these seem like good things to do, but maybe there’s something out of balance when you’re constantly looking for the fix.