The code hole is a solitary place somewhere in another dimension. It has no taste, no smell. It's dark but full of text, endless text, a visual tapestry of characters and number, curly brackets, semicolons. You are transformed into a strange creature made up of nothing but eyes, a brain, and fingers. The body becomes a phantom, a ghost, a background noise that gets tuned out. More than anything it is a tunnel, a movement of pure thought...
It's also a kind of addiction, because the world inside and outside follow a completely different set of rules. The hole of massive but there is the potential, the possibility to have some kind of control. Things make sense in the code hole in a way they don't outside. The more time you spend there the less you want to deal with the rest.
I find this thing hard to articulate. Maybe thats the nature of it. I go in and out of times when I am heavy in the code hole, where my body becomes an afterthought, I feel transformed into another kind of creature. I've had times when I dream of code ... in that moment when you are half asleep and half awake and I see lines of text. It kind of scared me. At times I've described being a programmer as like being a coal miner with the havoc it seemed to wreak on my body (this is obviously an exaggeration — coding does not give you black lungs).
But it also can feel gratifying in the moment. The feeling of creating something out of nothing. My favorite part is at the beginning, setting the stage — it can be pure then and full of potential. But as things progress, deadlines happen and technical debt accrues. Then it becomes an albatross, the fun is gone but the work remains. But when it's good it's so damn exciting. I've had times where I've been drunk on technology, think of the possibilities!
But ultimately you have to leave the code hole and then comes the crash. So often it feels like time wasted — what once felt all-encompassing becomes intangible, superfluous, thin air. Your body groans, resents you. You resent having to be a body again, with its constraints and unpleasantries. Is it really worth it?
My therapist and I talk about "dissociation" a lot — that state where you immerse yourself in something to avoid the real ugly truth of being a body with emotions and needs and trauma. The code hole is dissociation in a nutshell — the one difference from most of my other dissociative habits is I get paid really well to do it.
There have been times when I've been able to work without going in too deep. Make a plan, break it in to pieces, take breaks, remember to eat... but those have been few and far between. So often it means donning my mining helmet and spending hours, days in there.
There have also been times when I've been convinced I need to give it up like an alcoholic needs to give up drinking. I've long been fascinated by John and James Whitney — the brothers who worked on US military targeting computers, and then bought the decommissioned ones and used them to create some of the first computer animations. John continued his career into old age, innovating computer animation along the way. James had a spiritual awakening and left it all behind, became a potter an ceramicist. How romantic, to close your laptop for good and make pots until you die!
This is a duality I am stuck with and I'm working to re-integrate. But what is coding without the code hole, without the dopamine rush of changing the code and refreshing/rebuilding/restarting to see it manifested?