Arch

My priorities recently have been overwhelmingly careerist. I’ve been spending almost all of my time gathering certifications, working on making my resume look good, preparing for interviews, and really internalizing the idea that getting a job that doesn’t fill me with malevolence after my shift has ended may take months. I am posting on LinkedIn, sending out pathetic emails pleading to “follow up” on submitting a resume hoping that “we can link” and maybe even “circle back” if I’m lucky enough.

It’s dreary work, truly. I certainly wish it was within my ability to make something beautiful, so that the films I make could pay for themselves. I wish I was capable of photography inspiring enough that people would purchase prints, that way I would at least not lose money so thoroughly. When I have my notebook in hand, jotting things down as I listen to another balding man—much like myself—go on about networking layers, this horrific sense nestles in the pit of my stomach that has, if nothing else, provided such a desire to flee that I am slowly becoming an expert runner.

The fact I am even taking time to write this instead of just sinking deeper into reptilian habituation is something that provides with it a feeling of substantial guilt, even though I’m writing it while at the job which just promoted me. Yes, they made me a boss. I did not think such a thing was possible, I had always assumed that some people were simply born bosses. Yet, even that is humiliating. Being a boss is exactly what you think it is. You work less while confidently telling your employees that you work just as hard as they do. If they start to catch on, you can always just say something along the lines of being Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt.

On LinkedIn, while I am viscerally feeling my soul drown in sludge, I cannot help but notice how much of its timeline is filled with people talking about how torturous the process of getting hired is at this point in time. Hiring managers are doing everything wrong, talented folks aren’t able to be seen. Bizarrely, it makes me feel less bad. Not at all due to the fact that other people are also finding this sort of thing difficult, but because I’m not stupid enough to complain about optics in front of the panopticon. Surely that must account for something, right?

The hiring process is incredibly opaque, and there certainly is a feeling of agonizingly figuring things out from an environment which isn’t really designed to give you any kind of usable feedback. In fact, the very foundation of HR is itself rooted in senseless torture. Although I truly do find myself incredibly dismayed at the prospect of looking for work, I am somewhat impressed at the capacity for a single, individual mind to put something together from nothing. A few weeks ago, the idea of being a network engineer felt impossible to approach. These days, I’m much more able to wake up any given morning and have a very concise idea of precisely what it is I need to be accomplishing in a week. Sure, there’s a palpable sense of hopelessness, but that feels much less bothersome to me after a day spent constructing a virtual network from scratch. If I cannot find an evaluation copy of Windows 10 Enterprise on Microsoft’s official website, that’s okay—anyone into this line of business would naturally know that other means exist, so time-honored that they date back to the age of sail. Now, a tiny little enterprise network exists in the imagination of my dilapidated Macbook Pro. The Intel one.

“Persistence wears down resistance,” as they say. I am trying to make it into mansion world, and I have faith that I can do it as long as I can just suffer with some amount of dignity; near total disregard at the lack of fun in my life. The point of this all, however, is not to complain about the difficulty in finding a job. I’m sure everyone is having a tough time right now. What I am struggling with in particular, though, is an abject hatred of technology. I built desktops as a child, there was something wonderful about the experience of learning that none of this really is that difficult at all. It’s hard to incorrectly put the thing together—much like any other electronic, cables can only go where they fit. Marcella Hazan similarly heartens the weary when faced with the prospect of cutting up a whole chicken. Victory is guaranteed over a long enough time spent with a knife and whole bird. Even the more I learn about enterprise standards, it is revolting to me how much of the consumer-side rot has seeped into industry. Entire jobs predicated upon the existence of a handful of webapps. The diminishing of Windows Server into Intune and Entra, glorified CRMs. It makes me wonder how much of every other specialized job these days has not increased in difficulty necessarily, but rather requires a kind of proprietary specialization that more or less assumes total market dominance by a handful of companies, as it exists now, must last forever.

My younger brother is a ServiceNow engineer. The last time I saw him, he gave me an old HP ProBook simply because he had no use for it anymore. The thing long collected dust until, one evening, I flashed it and installed Linux. It’s not my first foray; years ago I built an Ubuntu desktop from cheap, old computer parts just to see if I could. Of course, I could. The whole thing was a manifested thought experiment though, Ubuntu included. It felt it nice, but sort of unserious. I chose Arch. If you’re familiar with Linux at all, I’m sure the memes predate things. However, my desire was for minimalism—that my computer would ask me for complete responsibility. Sure enough, the installer was a simple command line interface. This sort of thing is scary to a lot of folks, but it really asks you a question and expects an answer. It’s very simple. Wifi worked without issue, though I’ll admit that I did screw up the first time around and simply not pick a desktop environment (ironically, I now wish that I would have not installed one at all, simply opting for a window manager rather than a fully fledged desktop environment). I was kind of shocked at how simple it was.

Arch is sort of notorious, maybe next to Gentoo, for giving you absolutely nothing. That you must piece it together, brick by brick, to have anything at all. Not to say that I did it on my own; I certainly read documentation, consulted friends who use Linux, etc. However, even with as “unfriendly” as Arch is, I cannot believe how far Linux has come in such short time, all things considered. After installing a handful of applications (from the command line), I signed into my various email accounts, logged into the standard suite of websites, and decided that, rather than scrolling x.com whenever some dead air materializes, I would instead spend time learning. It turns out, whether due to some sort of reactionary, saturnine luddism or otherwise, that I quite like using the command line. There’s a familiar sense of friction, the feeling of learning, that is slowly leading me to a moment where my computer becomes no different from a motorcycle or film camera—something you can figure out in fifteen minutes of looking at it.

What shocked me the most however was one evening where I was typing away in terminal. I have a workflow for creating scripts that is somewhat redundant where I first make the empty file, almost purely because I find it so endearing that the command to create a file in terminal is simply: “touch.” I had learned that the very first line of any script will tell Linux what to use to interpret it, then reasoned that you must be able to change what the terminal emulator uses to interpret your commands. While working in bash, I type in “zsh.” It changes! I type in “bash.” It changes back! I type in “python3.” Now, terminal lets me communicate with it directly in python! For the first time in what must have been a decade, I felt joy using a computer. Of course, I went back to my MacBook and discovered that the same thing was possible there, but Apple do everything within their power to prevent the average user from ever seeing a CLI.

I know that I have written about all kinds of things here. Film, food, whatever. I think the capacity of the human mind to learn whatever it wants is an incredible facet of humanity. It is a miracle on the same level as the very fruit on my kitchen counter. What’s difficult is to arrive at a place where learning is fun, where it is stimulating. I will probably not write about technology again, not in a similar sense—I find it largely a subject made boring almost by design. So, if you are, for whatever reason, interested in the other things that I talk about, understand that the subject of Linux is likely never to come up again here. I am absolutely shocked at how fast Arch is on this decrepit hardware, how much friendlier it is to me—the User—than everyone else had warned me that it would be. I cannot believe that it is free, I cannot believe how far the development of this community-driven computational project has come; that a mountain of human minds, in their great capacity for learning, have produced something so sophisticated without ever asking themselves how they could pilfer the pockets of their users; what advanced concepts that could develop simply to monetize an abstraction. Even in my novice state, I am interacting with minds like my own. It is thrilling and, in an odd way, very hopeful.

I am working on a sophisticated virtual homelab that I can add to my resume. It’s up and running now, all I really need to do is begin publishing things to my personal github as a sort of tracker for these various projects. When I get the job I am looking for—and I’m confident that I will—it will absolutely be in no small part due to the fact that Arch Linux returned the joy of interacting with these devices back into my life. I know that a lot of people spend hours publicly pontificating on the decline in literacy, and my pet belief is that so much of what you consider in your life on a day-to-day basis does not require at all that you consider the nuts and bolts of how the content you observe is delivered to you. You are, in a sense, a vegetable, not even aware of the reality that you can change things—at a cost, of course. Compared to how easy an infinite scroll is, how simple it is to have an AI assistant ready to automate something for you, the idea of opening up a command line and simply saying “touch” seems like something so much more difficult than it is, such that you never think to yourself to do it at all.

At the risk of sounding smug, I am not a genius. If I was, I would simply not be poor. Unfortunately, I am for the moment so I clearly also have much more learning to do. If you read this, I appreciate you having done so. Last night, my third 16mm short film aired at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It was a fairly full theater, one which seats a maximum of 350 people, and I once again extracted laughs from the audience. I consider it a great success. I have a lot of ideas for other films, things which I am very confident about but don’t want to reveal just this moment. However, those things are on hold while I work at getting a better job, such that I can better afford them. I, sheepishly, want to apologize that this is the best I can do for now, joining the verbose vanguard of substack charlatans contributing to the gross, unnecessary overproduction of words. This is all a sort of pollution which makes the internet uglier, no matter how intellectually or aesthetically rich you fancy yourself. Before I let myself go too deeply to malevolence—towards my own class of people, no less—this is all simply to say that I am struggling as I am, now, because I have faith in the things that I want to make, that I wish to share with you all and the world. Right now, I have to do something else, to be a real bore, to be able to afford them.

Thank you for your time.