Occupational Burnout is a thing which people worry about a lot in the "real world" and it's why we encourage people, particularly information workers, to take regular breaks, to not think about their job outside of work. Indeed, burnout has been referred to as a disease and as such we recommend strongly that you avoid it.
Sadly, those of us who are blessed with the ability and the interest in contributing to F/LOSS tend to work hard, and then effectively "work as play" hard too; which can lead to burning out even more quickly. It can be even worse when the stress originates in your F/LOSS activity because it can be seen as making your 'funtime' less enjoyable.
Burning out is a leading cause of people having to retire from F/LOSS projects and as such, it's really important that you know when to step away from F/LOSS and have a break. You might prefer to spend a few days entirely away from your computer or just spend it immersed in a game. If you're particularly lucky/unlucky then you might just be able to work on a different project for a little while instead. Whatever you do to relax, be sure to increase your explicit relaxation time along with time you're spending on F/LOSS to keep yourself happy and healthy, and able to contribute for a nice long time to come.
Your homework this week is to just think about what you enjoy doing which isn't work or F/LOSS related at all, and go do it. Just shoo!
"Sadly, those of us who are blessed with the ability and the interest in contributing to F/LOSS"
I don't think this is done intentionally, but you seem to be suggesting that programming is an ability some people are blessed with, at least that's my interpretation of the above.
I profoundly disagree with that notion, and know it to be false through personal experience of working with people with no prior programming experience. The truth is there is really no special ability required, saying there is is akin to what the intellectuals of the late 19th century were saying about literature.
Those intellectuals essentially responded to mass education by obfuscating literature and art so that only they could understand it. I see the same thing happening when people sneer at languages like Ruby that aim to make things just a bit easier. It's a mirror image of the intellectuals sneering at popular literature.
_why understood this, and wrote the poignant guide in response. It is maybe slightly ironic, given folk's apparent perception of me as someone who is against equality that I am now bringing this argument here.
Perhaps
was a poor choice of words. The sense I was trying to get across was not that the ability to write code at all is something one gets blessed with, but more that some of are privileged enough to able to work on F/LOSS in our time, off our own backs, with our own money. In other words, that we have the richness of time and energy to work on F/LOSS. I feel in some sense blessed that I'm part of the tranche of society which has enough money, time, and facility to do this.
I trust that clarifies things for you.
I don't follow, are people privileged to be able to paint their garden shed a new colour at the weekend? Or write poetry in their free time? Or watch game of thrones in the evening? Or isn't that just a pretty standard expectation of what anyone can do in western society? Why do you think hacking on foss is some special privilege vs these other things?
I've written quite a bit of code in my free time, and I have to be honest with you, I don't really consider it a privilege to lock myself in a room at the weekend and bang out code, it's something I do mostly cause the way I look precludes me being able to date pretty ladies (let's just be honest here). I mean I enjoy it too, but I suspect that's due to me not being able to spend much time with the pretty ladies.
Also, why do you think you need money? The code I've produced over the years cost me exactly $0 to make, maybe your argument is that I'm middle class or something and so have the time, that's true, I am afforded that, but pretty much all people in a western society have some time for these things, not as much as they should by the way, but that's another story.
And I don't really get what you mean by "facility" either to be honest...
Most of these are examples of the privilege of having sufficient money to afford the materials and services required to do this (though I'll admit writing poetry likely requires the least in terms of material investment).
It's a 'pretty standard expectation' for people in my (and perhaps your) situation. People who are, to whatever extent, lucky (or whatever term you'd prefer to use) enough to have free time (not a given), sufficient money (not a given), sufficient space (not a given), and sufficient spoons (read about spoon theory if this isn't a term you're familiar with).
It means you are privileged enough to have free time, a computer to 'bang out code' on, the room in which to do that, the language facilities to understand enough about what you're doing to be able to do that, the good fortune to have had an education which enables you to understand and do it at all, and the mental fortitude and energy to do that in the first place.
I'm not touching this, I'm not in a position to discuss this kind of topic.
So you've never had to pay for the accomodation you used while coding? The food you burned up in the process? The computer on which you did the work? (And if you're using a computer provided by a workplace then I count that since it's a form of remuneration to be permitted to do personal activities with a work resource) Perhaps you haven't ever had to pay for any of that, in which case you simply had a financial privilege not afforded to a huge number of people who might otherwise be capable of doing FOSS work if they had been afforded similar.
I think you're massively overestimating the time, money, capability, spoons, etc, available to the average member of "western society". Also I was trying to speak in general, not just of "western society" which is an artificial narrowing of the scope of the discussion, though one I can understand since you seek to comprehend from the perspective of your lived experience.
Again I apologise, I thought it was clear that "facility" in this context meant access to computer resources, a lack of language barrier with respect to learning and participating in F/LOSS communities, a capability in a social sense to participate, and indeed an environment which is conducive to the act of producing software in the first place.
While this dicussion is interesting to me, I kinda feel like this isn't the right forum to continue it. I also don't feel that I'm necessarily the right person to attempt to widen your perspective on this (or indeed that I'm necessarily right to be trying to do so). I ask that you consider any questions posed in this response as rhetorical rather than as an attempt to elicit a response and, unless you have a comment about another aspect of the article, that you drop this line of discussion for now. Perhaps another article will be posted in the future which you can engage on this topic with in a more productive fashion.
Thank you for engaging with me on this, I think this comment thread will provide a good reference for others who want to understand more about this topic area.