Wonderful. The best lines:

No client can cancel it. No deadline can ruin it. The only failure would be to stop.

“Years ago, I stumbled across an image online: a Sumerian clay tablet covered in tiny wedge-shaped marks.”

Seeing weird ancient symbols and feeling a great urge to embark on a journey to learn/decipher them is common; actually doing it is much rarer. Think of Champollion who, when shown Egyptian hieroglyphs by Fourier (as it is often mythologized) when he was just 11, devoting his life to them.

However, if you are tempted to take on Sumerian after reading this, I suggest that you start with Akkadian first. Chances are you’ll try to learn ancient languages by self study and you’ll need a lot of reading material: this is the advantage of Akkadian over Sumerian. Also the grammar will be easier to grasp. And it has borrowed a lot from Sumerian, so you can take it as a later step, if you so choose.

If you want to read inscriptions from local museums while keeping the cool ancient script angle, then, of course, go with Middle Egyptian. If, on the other hand you are determined to be one of the handful experts in the world on an ancient language, I’d suggest Hurrian or Luwian.

"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."

This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but I never felt burned-out. I felt tired, but content.

It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

A friend of mine just related one of his epiphanies:

"I found myself saying that I can't concentrate because it's not interesting. I chided myself and told me to concentrate so that I would find it interesting".

Aurelius would have been proud (3.2, "And so, if a man has a feeling for, and a deeper insight into the processes of the Universe, there is hardly one but will somehow appear to present itself pleasantly to him, even among mere attendant circumstances.")

> That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness.

This can be a life changing thought!

It's a hobby though.

At the end of the article the author says 'This is why telling burned-out people to "find work-life balance" or "pursue hobbies" often fails.' But this is literally a hobby. Something you put effort into without needing to justify why, just because you enjoy it, is a hobby.

It's cool but the author makes it out to be way more profound than it is (ironically, justifying it with a narrative to turn out as content.)

Fella says you don’t need to monetise everything, then writes about it on a blog with a subscribe button and affiliate disclaimer. Okay.

Feels a little odd to painstakingly draw, with a pen, symbols that were intended to be created by pressing a stick into wet clay. Surely there's got to be a better way to hand-write cuneiform.