As a new joiner in the monastery, I cannot speak from long experience. I am still full of zeal and hope that other responsibilities in life will not take over soon. My breadwinning, alas, is not based on Perl.

However, the current addiction is strong and the experience system is a big incentive. The secular powers would call it gamification. How much more of a satisfaction it is to solve other people's problems when you also get a (hopefully positive) feedback not only from the sufferers that have insufficient understanding of Perl but also from the Elevated that can really judge the proficiency of your utterings.

It does not feel very monkish though and seems to show a lack of humility. I felt bad about writing that script that retrieves my level, xp, and cumulative reputation of writeups from the monastery. I will use the frequency of running it as a measure of my progress in the true dedication to the cause and hope to be down to two times a day quite soon. I will also abandon my project to post the output to facebook automatically.

In the meantime, continuing to read, learn and write I will enjoy.