Welcome
This is a deeply personal project space for my “Not Degree”.
The landscape
I fail at formal education - badly
I wanted to be an autodidact but somehow also failed at that.
So much failure. So many times. And in so many ways.
Humiliated
I didn’t understand how things could be this way.
I am the son of two school teachers.
But all was not lost.
I kept trying. For decades.
I kept borrowing library books and returning them (mostly) unread.
I didn’t give up on myself.
Piece Number One
The one day in my early 40s a library book that I did read ambushed me.
It was the “The Ghost in My Brain: How a Concussion Stole My Life and How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Helped me get it back” by Clark Elliot.
One week after alarm bells started ringing. I’d never had a concusion but the author described having some attentional difficulties prior to his concussion.
It took me the longest six weeks of waiting of my life to confirm that I have (Inattentive) ADHD from a Psychatrist.
This is what I consider to be piece one of the puzzle.
Piece Number Two
The next piece arrived some years later and complicated my energy management challenges further.
I over-extended myself and became very unwell. This episode tipped into bipolar disorder.
Piece number three
It presents internally, in the same way as my inattentive ADHD is focused inward, and the term I use for it is sub-clinical demand resistance.
I’ve never been formally diagnosed with this but these words best describe something that I experience frequently every day.
Like my ADHD that went under the radar until I was over 40 this too has gone under the radar.
Symptoms include that I can come up with an idea that I think is brilliant one day, and the very next day I can’t bring myself to execute any steps towards the idea.
(A quick note: For big things like ADHD and bipolar I would be distrustful of a self-diagnosis (even as I was right about my ADHD) and always seek the help of a professional - but in the case of the sub-clinical demand resistance I am confortable with just a self-diagnosis and feel it gives me a handle on my internal state in a way that allows me to function way more productively.)
What this amounts to is that I have a very specific profile when it comes to my energy management needs while learning things.
What’s a Not Degree?
I typed into ChatGPT “How many hours would an average australian degree take to complete”
The answer was lots!
On hearing the numbers
“I am imagining a degrees worth of free range study over 10 years”
A key point
I’d need tools and techniques that were kind to my energy management challenges
Creating my logger
Immediately in that chat I started designing my logging tools.
In the end I vibecoded a simple time logger system in Python that was seperate from a activity logger which simply included one activity per log file line.
This seperation was quietly psychologically important to me - I expressedly didn’t want to log how long I spent at each activity.
I also didn’t care if I forgot to log an activity.
All of this was designed to sit very lightly on my shoulders largely to work as best with my demand resistance as possible.
I actually loaded up these simple python scripts on my laptop, but also on my android phone using Termux an android terminal from within which I could run Python.
That way my not degree hours could be counted when I was doing things away from my computer.
When it started. How it’s going.
I started logging on 9 January 2026. It’s now March the 3rd. I have done over 90 hours towards my Not Degree in that time.
Given my life history in both education and self-education that’s beyond unbelievable.
I keep returning and returning again to work on it.
Where once effort felt like it was droplets of water evaporating immediately on a hot frying pan now there is mounting evidence that I am not a learning failure.
An end to the old boom and bust cycle
Before even the bipolar occurred (which makes the situation worse) the ADHD set me up for boom and bust cycles where I’d try really hard on a project for a week, or a month, or six weeks and end up in an exhausted mess.
I’d then have to recover for a month or two, sometimes longer.
My Not Degree has been a revelation and is not following this energy pattern, and has very much locked onto a sustainable energy expenditure pattern.