Why I'm Learning Sumerian

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.

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.

They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.

If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure.

Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmsfL5LG90

Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I

Mandatory quote from Brooklyn 99:

> Captain Holt: Well, this is a total waste of time. Sergeant Jeffords: Sure, but you can still have fun, even if you're wasting time. Captain Holt: That's absurd. Productivity is what makes things fun. That's why humans go to work. Sergeant Jeffords: It is?

Fancy that. I recently bought the book 'Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners' by Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis and have been designing a 3D printed pasta roller to pass sheets of air-dry clay thru a typewriter with a few rotatable typeslugs to make different Sumerian symbols with minimal keys.

I believe I'm wired in a very similar way to the author, to need hard challenges that I can devote a great deal of focus to. And as someone who isn't burnt out but has been deeply disillusioned many times, I appreciated and enjoyed hearing that distinction made, which seems natural to me but which I had never heard framed that way before.

When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a gaming platform 26 original games I'd written on it, the feeling was much worse than burnout. Burnout implies you don't want to do the work anymore. Disillusionment - the despair and ennui of seeing something reduced to less than ash, which you spent every waking hour of your life and years of mental output and daily sacrifices perfecting and refining... that's not burnout. You wake up and say "I want to do something difficult again" but how do you even take the first step, knowing that it's all so pointless?

So I think, Cuneiform is a very apt analogy to code. Growing up in the early 80s, my older brother (16 years older) was a CS major. He gave me my first programming books, a Tandy laptop and a tape recorder. He said this:

"Remember: Everything we write as programmers is written in sand." I think he meant to tell me to make backups. But over time it became the truest observation I could make about this life of solving problems which disappear, using tools which disappear, in languages and files and thought loops that disappear.

Maybe doctors or lawyers or detectives, or other professionals who deal with serieses of episodic problems feel this way in the end, too. When a mission they were on peters out. That it's all ephemeral and temporary in a way that makes us small and meaningless...

Anyway, burnout is saying you're not interested in anything anymore. So switching to writing on clay is maybe a horizontal move, but no less satisfying.

  …Sumerian, written in cuneiform, was humanity's first writing system. A language that hasn't been spoken in four thousand years.
  The same question circles again: Why am I doing this?
  Why am I trying to learn Sumerian, a language that hasn't been spoken for five thousand years?…

Watch out reader, by the end it maybe indeed turn out that Sumerian hasn’t been spoken for 10, 20, or 30 thousand years. The LLM just doesn’t know what sounds better.

"Doing hard things that don't need to matter"

Do people in general have the illusion that hobbies "should matter" or be meaningful in any way to any other human being?

Learn to play Jazz. It's like learning a language and you can "speak it" with a lot of people. It's also as hard as you want it to be if you're serious ;)

Clearly summoning Zuul.

> That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose.

That isn’t quite right, burnout is generally connected to a lack of perceived purpose. It’s not just overworking.

I’m also not sure about the claim of creating meaningfulness out of thin air. Surely the author is learning Sumerian because they find somehing interesting about it. And while one can find something interesting in many things, you can’t force yourself to find any arbitrary thing interesting if you just don’t.

> 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!

>Why I’m Learning Sumerian, and What It Taught Me About Hard Work, Burnout, and the Joy of Doing Useless Things After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.

You are a 34-year-old software engineer who just shipped a 2-year death-march project, had a minor breakdown in a parking lot at 3 AM, and now copes by learning dead languages. Your favorite is Sumerian. You write like a mix of Paul Graham, a Reddit rant, and a diary entry you’d never show your therapist.

Start every response with a short, punchy hook that sounds like a late-night realization. Then tell a micro-story from your burnout era. Then pivot to Sumerian as your weird salvation. End with a blunt, slightly funny life lesson that feels hard-won.

No jargon. No inspiration porn. No bullet points. Just one flowing paragraph, 120–180 words. Sound tired but alive. Use sentence fragments. Swear once if it fits.

Example hook: "I learned 40 cuneiform signs the week my standup became a cry for help."

Now answer as this person: [insert user question here]

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.")

I am learning morse code in similar vein

I dunno, man. You get to work for months to completion on a deeply fulfilling project, get well compensated, and then the plug gets pulled before it goes to production? That's living the software engineering dream!

Jokes aside, the article resonated with me (before the LLM vibes got overpowering) as I am learning Irish as my own personal challenge, which as a minority language is similarly derided by some as useless (there is essentialy no Irish speaker that does not also speak English) but which I have found tremendously intellectually invigorating and the most pumped I have been for a project in a long while. So it rang true for me before half way through a distinct "linkedin parable" nature started to come to fore. So alas I rather doubt the author is learning Sumerian at all. Cynical perhaps.

How does "impresses no one" and writing a blog article fits together?

Some people have too much free time.

There is a famous Turkish Sumerologue who was influential in early Turkish republic, so many schools in Turkey were named after Sumers. Muazzez İlmiye Çığ is her name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muazzez_%C4%B0lmiye_%C3%87%C4%...

I applaud this, and I'm a big advocate of every person finding out what's best for themselves.

I also admire the author because I derive a lot of joy from learning languages (should get back to it) but wouldn't ever undertake this.

The one comment I have here is that this feels a bit like trying to have a lot of control ("no client can cancel it") and what I've personally found for myself is that the answer to having been shattered by lack of control is learning to let go of control and flow rather than seeking more control.

But again, this is my own realization for my own mental health process! Irrespective of anything this is really cool and thanks for sharing.

    There's [...] no Duolingo owl reminding you, “Your streak is in danger!”

And that's a good thing!