I was sitting in a hospital parking lot at 3 AM, engine running, carbon monoxide slowly filling the cab, when my phone buzzed. A YouTube notification. “0 to LSP in Neovim (Language Server Protocol) - THE ULTIMATE SETUP.”
I wish I could tell you I turned the car off immediately. I didn’t. I sat there, hand on the gearshift, engine idling, watching that notification glow on my screen like some kind of stupid, beautiful beacon. And for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I tapped it.
That’s how this story starts. Not with hope. With exhaust fumes and a YouTube video about a text editor.
Let me back the fuck up.
Six months earlier, my wife of eleven years left me. Took our daughter, took the dog, took everything except the furniture because she said it “reminded her of bad decisions.” I came home to an empty house that still smelled like her shampoo, and I just… stopped. Stopped eating. Stopped answering calls. Stopped leaving the house except to buy beer and cigarettes at the gas station down the street.
I lost my job because I couldn’t bring myself to log in anymore. My boss called it “a mutual understanding.” I called it what it was: I was disappearing, and everyone around me could see it happening in real time.
My daughter was seven. She called me once a week, and every time she’d ask “Daddy, when are you coming to see me?” I’d make up some excuse. She stopped asking after a while. That was worse than the divorce. That silence was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
I wasn’t planning on killing myself that night in the hospital parking lot. I mean, I was, but I wasn’t committed to it, you know? I was just… testing the waters. Seeing how it felt. The engine running. The windows up. The way the cold started to feel almost peaceful.
And then ThePrimeagen’s stupid YouTube notification showed up, and for some goddamn reason, I thought: “I should learn what LSP even means before I die.”
If you’ve never heard of ThePrimeagen, he’s this bald guy on YouTube who makes videos about Neovim, which is a text editor that configures itself. He’s loud. He’s intense. He swears a lot. He does this thing where he literally yells about semantic grep and refactoring and “we’re going to build this from SCRATCH” and honestly, watching his videos feels like watching a guy who is absolutely furious at the concept of inefficient code.
But here’s the thing: he’s also joyful about it. Not in a peaceful way. In a chaotic, screaming, throwing furniture around way. He gets genuinely hyped about treesitter parsers. He loses his mind over a good telescope configuration. He once spent forty-five minutes configuring a statusline and you could tell it was the best forty-five minutes of his entire year.
That night, in my car, with the engine running, I watched him build a Neovim config from scratch. I watched him install lazy.nvim, set up packer, configure nvim-cmp, lose his absolute mind over cmp-settings, and then—somehow—end up with something that worked. Something beautiful. Something he’d built with his own hands, piece by piece, from nothing.
And I thought: “I want to know how to do that.”
Not because I cared about text editors. I didn’t. I couldn’t give a single shit about treesitter or LSP or any of that. But I wanted to feel what he was feeling. That energy. That aliveness. That sheer, uncut enthusiasm for something so ridiculously specific and nerdy that most people would laugh at it.
I turned off the engine. I went home. I installed Neovim.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that learning vim bindings fixed my depression. That’s bullshit, and if anyone tells you that, they’re either lying or they’re fourteen years old and haven’t been through real shit yet.
What happened was more complicated than that.
What happened was: I had something to do. I had a reason to stay awake. I had a problem to solve that didn’t involve my failed marriage, or my daughter’s voice going quiet on the phone, or the void where my life used to be.
I started with the basics. hjkl. i to insert. Esc to leave insert mode. I kept hitting the wrong key and exiting out of everything and I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. I watched ThePrimeagen’s video on “vim as a language” — where you learn that dw deletes a word, ciw changes inside a word, f{char} finds a character — and something clicked.
It was like learning a new language. Not a programming language. A movement language. A way of flowing through text like water. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. I fell down the rabbit hole. I watched every video he’d ever made. I built my own config, stupid and broken at first, then slightly less broken, then actually kind of good.
I started posting on r/theprimeagen. I started helping people debug their LSP setups. I started writing my own plugins, badly at first, then less badly. I started waking up with something to look forward to.
It’s been eight months now.
I have a job again. Part-time, remote, writing code for a startup that doesn’t care that I disappeared for six months. My daughter comes over on weekends. She’s nine now, and she’s learning to read, and she asked me to show her “what you do on your computer” so I pulled up Neovim and showed her how to type ihello worldEsc and her eyes went wide like I’d performed magic.
She’s going to learn vim. Maybe. Probably. I won’t push her. But I want to give her the option.
I still watch ThePrimeagen’s videos. He’s still loud. He’s still intense. He still screams about dotfiles like they personally wronged him. And every single time, I feel something ignite in my chest. Not just about code. About caring about something. About being obsessed with getting better at something, anything, even if it’s a text editor that 99% of developers will never use.
If you’re reading this and you’re in a bad place, I’m not going to tell you to install Neovim. That’s stupid advice. That’s the kind of advice people give when they don’t know what else to say.
But I’ll tell you this: find your weird little obsession. Find the thing that makes you want to stay awake long enough to learn it. It doesn’t have to be vim. It doesn’t have to be programming. It can be anything — birdwatching, pottery, competitive dog grooming, I don’t give a shit. But find the thing that makes you feel alive, even if it’s small, even if it’s ridiculous, even if nobody else understands it.
For me, it was a text editor. A loud bald man on YouTube. A community of people who care way too much about semantic grep.
And it’s not much. But it’s enough.
It’s enough to keep me here.
To ThePrimeagen, if you ever read this: I don’t know you, and you’ll never know my name, and that’s fine. But you put a notification on my phone at 3 AM on the worst night of my life, and I clicked it, and I’m still here. So thank you. Thank you for being unapologetically obsessed with something stupid. Thank you for caring so much about a text editor that most people don’t even know exists.
And to everyone else: learn your vim bindings. Your fingers will thank you. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the thing that saves your life will be something as small and strange as a man yelling about treesitter at 2 million views.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out why my LSP keeps crashing. Because apparently, that’s my life now. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.