So, Simon was pretty direct and asked me why I’m fucking my life up. You know, I have a job, I don’t work anywhere near the hours I could work on it, and if I did work those hours, I could pay the rent and then some with few worries. So why not “just stick your nose to the grindstone and put in the hours.” I empathised with his frustration. It’s a frustration I’ve felt. And he’s not the first person to say such things, by a long shot. I surround myself with eminently logical people, who point this out to me, repeatedly.
But I am not driven by logic. I know logic intimately, and I use it skillfully. But I cannot use logic to convince me to go where I feel no drive. It would have made total sense to finish out the year at motorola. It would be perfectly logical to keep doing what I’m doing for now, and hope Ro pulls out another contract (though still hedging my bets by looking for other work). Computer science is creative work, at least the way I do it. And if there is no emotion urging me to the work, it will not get done.
Nobody’s paying for omphaloskepsis these days. More’s the pity. I’d make a killing.
To Simon, my explanations (perhaps more detailed, perhaps less articulate than the one I just provided) sounded like excuses. And regardless of the articulation, maybe they are. Yeah, I’m hoping my parents help pull my fiscal bacon out of the fire. They probably can keep my head above water for a little while, job or no. And they’d probably be willing to. They can’t buy meaning or a sense of accomplishment for me (duh), and that sort of matters more at the moment (ask me again, if/when I become flat broke).
Ro would like to know whether or not he can rely on me to keep with the work we’re doing now. I’m currently giving it about as much as I have motivation to give. Ro is one of those supremely logical people. I’ve seen no sign that he speaks the right language to light a fire under my ass for the work we’re doing, if that’s even possible.
Then again, Ro is my longest running employer ever. My lengthy whatever of last night ended on a note of personal disappointment. I didn’t inject the obvious “but things are actually improving appreciably. Look at this, that, and the other thing.” Learning not to tack up the “it’s all okay, no gaping wounds here” in front of disfunctionality was a little goal I’d set for myself awhile ago. Disfunctionality happens, and should not be feared. No more than it should be nurtured.
I don’t think I’ll find further coherence tonight, and so until tomorrow, I bid you, rest well.
> To Simon, my explanations (perhaps more detailed, perhaps less
> articulate than the one I just provided) sounded like excuses. And
> regardless of the articulation, maybe they are.
It sounds like an excuse because the line of reasoning is intimately familiar to almost everyone. But you just HAVE to put your nose to the grindstone, or you don’t get anywhere. You’ll have to come to terms with this sooner or later and realize that if it means anything to you to do something with your life. A fruitful career, a sense of accomplishment, and making a sustained difference all require sticking it through the hard times.
I highly doubt that you are somehow wired to be incapable of doing unpleasant work, but you seem unable to get past the costs of the moment and see the benefits of the future. There are strategies that you can take to help you accomplish this. If there are immediate circumstances that make you unable to do work (chat clients, the web), consider removing them. Your work environment also affects your productivity A LOT. Are you currently working in your living room? Bad, Steve, bad! It’s 100% perfectly normal to get bored with something, but there are always several facets to one problem. Have a few different things to work on kept in reserve.
Another thing that might help is to not switch geographic areas. You lose a lot in a move: social and occupational connections, expectations of others, and the community that you’ve built.
Just my 2 cents. Worth about that much. 🙂
You do realize that Ro and I have been working in a netless office in west berkeley for, oh, about the past 6 months, right? =) And I haven’t appreciably increased my hours. I think I have increased my per hour productivity, but not the number of hours.
Furthermore, I would think you’d know that it’s not that I’m lazy, or pathologically averse to putting forth effort. I can cite numerous examples of me putting my nose to the grindstone, and getting something done. When I do, I generally enjoy it. The clinic, the several hundred (maybe a few thousand, actually) pages of economic literature I read last semester, the paper I finally churned out, etc, etc.
Regardless of whether I quit working for Ro, or go on the parental dole, after I finish getting my application ducks all in a row, (and some while I’m getting them in a row), I’m going to continue working on marketable tech skills. Some geek consulting would fit in perfectly. If part time, with no locational commitments, it would allow me to continue working with Ro, bring in more money, and develop more useful/marketable skills.
The prospect of moving my permanent residence, as I said earlier, does not appeal to me right now. I want to stay here, at least until I find out whether or not I made it into Cal.
Plus, you know, even if I worked time and a half on pods until march, I still wouldn’t completely haul my ass out debt, I’d have spent all my time that could have been spent developing future opportunities (say, grad school and/or tech consulting foo), and would only be slightly less screwed than I am now.
Working on this future-oriented stuff may very well get me a significantly higher in-flow than I currently have. And I certainly find it far more satisfying than the computer vision work.