2025-01-03

I can't believe that working from home for about 5 years now is pushing me to actually stop being an employee altogether. This disbelief has been brewing for a few months now after getting my new laptop. For context, I have used a Dell Latitude laptop that I bought in the secondary market last 2019. It was an Intel i5 6th Gen chip that was already four years old at the time I bought it.

That laptop has served me so well in the last 4 years, which is actually still running good today for basic browsing and office tasks. It got me through my digital nomad era, taking home writing tasks from work and working on it during the weekends in coffee shops so I have an excuse to leave home. But I did enjoy that lifestyle because it was a brief freedom away from nine-to-five office environment weekdays. That Dell was lightweight as hell and I can just take it and roam around without feeling the burden of its weight on my back.

Working on weekends did bring me a sense of delight because I think I have a workaholic nature that would make me forget the time as long as I love doing what I do. Writing and coffee does indeed make a good combination. Then add brief walks in-between so that sense of freedom I got was something that felt desirable and true to my nature.

When the pandemic hit, I essentially became a stay-at-home writer whose hours gradually became more repetitive than my office experience. I had to make up rituals within the confines of my own space to trigger "working mode" in my brain and work until necessary. This working setup stayed the same until today. Of course, there are occasional working trips here and there but not as frequent as I liked them to be. Freedom started forming into a different shape. It started to become what I've been chasing after.

I discovered a type of freedom that also freed me from associating freedom with desire. In the past few years I have rediscovered a sense of responsibility and accountability in my own decision-making. I removed myself from serious writing and left it as my specialized tool in bringing food on the table. I gave up every attachment to what used to make me feel alive in terms of creativity. Then, a sense of control started to take shape.

I started assuming responsibility in my job and became good at it, adding value to my position in the company. This forced me to push my laptop to its limits, working with different types of software that consume all of its resources in order to function. It survived a live session with my manager where brainstorming and creation intertwined in a whole working day (with overtime), multitasking during a live-streamed video call and me working on designing all at the same time.

Experiencing that capability of my machine, I felt that I will hit its limit very soon. Eventually it did. A couple of Windows updates later made it slower even after a clean install of Windows, which prompted me to try Linux on that laptop. That was another sense of freedom felt during this experience but that story will be for another day.

Now, I'm daily driving a ThinkPad with the latest AMD Ryzen 5 mobile chip and it's doing wonders. It has allowed me to finally publish this digital garden with ease with a kind of optimized workflow that does not limit my creative imagination. Executing multiple lines of code does not prompt my machine's fans to go as wild as an airplane's engines. It is quiet while a lot is happening.

This laptop will kill my employment. Because I understand now, throughout those 5 years that I really want to spend my time doing the thing that I love and that is writing about the things that I care about. If it does not kill my career, then I will still have a realized freedom of creating something I've been imagining but was not able to do before (or would have taken me more years because of hardware limitations).

This digital garden has been on the works for a couple of years now and I was just able to properly execute it last month. In its current state, this is how I want it. The way to maintain it is what best reflect my own workflow. I know I can still improve this.

This is only the first step to regain that creative freedom.