So I spent my day caffeinated up to the eyeballs, loud music playing, churning out documentation until I started spamming Twitter with all-caps weirdness and I started wanting the phrase “COFFEE FOR THE COFFEE GOD! MUGS FOR THE MUG THRONE!” emblazoned on my coffee mug and, frankly, my soul. (Thanks @Bobolequiff.)

@HolyHaddock later tweeted about his much more restful afternoon, but while I can appreciate it being nice, it just seems so much less… epic.

There’s no sensation, for me, like finally achieving the hyperactive nirvana of flow.

It takes caffeine, of course – four cups of strong coffee over the course of the day, each one timed to mitigate the crash from the last. It takes music – the kind of music that doesn’t give a damn about genre or technique, but is brutally designed to hot-weld your eardrums to your adrenal gland with lightning at 150 beats per minute. It takes focus – a single task to be done, no distractions except for the continual background process of the internet’s pulse.

It just accelerates, never stopping. Athletes talk about “hitting the wall”, you reach a point where it hurts so much you just can’t find a way to carry on, until at last you crack it. But there’s none of that, because it’s all in your mind and your mind is hot-wired. It’s a single white-hot moment that lasts for hours but feels like microseconds, where ideas escape your brain at a billion degrees Kelvin and etch themselves into reality.

Sure, I’ll probably explode in a shower of caffeine and adrenaline when I’m about 30. But for now, screw restful afternoons. Eyes wide open, brain set to overdrive. It’s like feeling alive, only more so.