Programming can ruin your life

A colleague at work sent this this link around. I must admit, I felt a slight shock while reading it. "Wow, this is kind what is happening to me," I thought. At the same time, I entertained brief thoughts of relief... "Whew, at least I'm not a complete geek". At times like this I generally seek salvation in sports, or hobbies that have as little to do with programming as possible.

I remember second year uni, where in a desperate attempt to not burn out in computing I took Japanese as an elective. It helped, and I made it through second year and managed to eventually graduate, but I can't help thinking that learning a foreign language isn't completely unrelated to programming... Now that I think about it, the majority of the things I do are in someway programming related. And even if they are not, I find myself taking a programmer's approach to them. While it works, and I tend to achieve most of the goals that I set, it's kind of concerning to acknowledge that my choice of profession has resulted in a mind-altering experience.

Then again, if I think back to my days as a gamer back in high school, I distinctly recall a brief period of time where I was obsessed with completing a stage of a game in the most perfect way I could find. If I screwed up, then I re-loaded from a "perfect" save-point and tried again. I do remember acknowledging to myself that in a way it was ridiculous, it didn't really matter that much, cause I was having fun. I find some consolation in that those those days were years before I even thought about programming -- so, in a way, it could be that my behavioral pattern matched my career choice, as opposed to my career choice altering my behavioural patterns...

If that is so, then the title of the above-mentioned article doesn't really apply to me, because in essence my life was "ruined" well before programming managed to get it's claws on it .

As I'm writing about this, I'm chatting with my father, who has also been blessed with the experience of treating programming as a profession. "That's like saying that life leads you to death," was his opinion of the article. While I agree, it was an interesting and thought provoking read.