Late Revelations
What happens when you find yourself at 47 and finally realize that you don’t like your occupation?
Every day is a challenge to get through the eight obligatory hours of the job. I have spent a lot of time over the years deluding myself that somehow I enjoyed working with computers. It is always the fault of something else: long hours, difficult co-workers, chemical imbalance in the brain. But now I’ve properly sifted all my excuses and am left with the conclusion that has been sitting in front of me the entire time. The last frontier was my mental state, and I’m confident now that my mood adjusting medicine is doing it’s thing. There are no more excuses, I simply don’t enjoy my line of work. In looking back I can’t recall any time when I relished the task of solving some problem with the computer. I never spend discretionary time programming. Never have.
What now?
Today I probably wrote a thousand lines of code, solved two problems that had been haunting me, and at the end of the day I couldn’t wait to log out. There was no satisfaction and absolutely no intrinsic reward in that work. I’ll never see the result that my work supplies the client, and I have no personal value in doing the work. At least if I were digging a hole I could enjoy the exercise. Instead I burn my retinas for 8+ hours a day while sitting on my fat ass. I may play a computer geek ‘on TV,’ but I despise the connection.
I haven’t memorized, nor find Monty Python very entertaining. I’ve only seen one or two partial episodes of the original Star Trek series. I’ve never read LoTR and haven’t seen the first three episodes of Star Wars. I don’t understand fantasy games like Magick and D&D. I don’t ‘hack’ code in my spare time. I don’t have any weird hobbies and am not a conspiracy nut. Kennedy was shot by Oswald and the towers fell because jetliners flew into them. I don’t watch cartoon network and I think Anime is gay. I couldn’t care less what the latest social network is and don’t ‘hang out’ with other geeks virtually or literally. I don’t attend any conferences, professional or otherwise. I owned an early Apple computer but I’m not proud of that. (Besides it really wasn’t mine anyway, dad bought it.)
With an important revelation about 20 years too late, what does an old geezer do?
I hear that people on average have about five careers. So far I’ve had one, but I’m not opposed to trying something else. The problem are the golden handcuffs. Sure, I could jump into a different occupation but nothing that pays what 25 years of Information Systems experience does.
Every Sunday I scan the employment section of the newspaper. For the same reason I scan the auto ads. I’m not interested in either, but I like to wonder what people are thinking… who can afford those new cars? And, who can live on those wages?
My dream job would be to drive a vehicle all day. Truck driving is the obvious, but I don’t think I could make much of a living at it. I wish there were meters or something to read out in the desert. I would climb into my Land Cruiser every day and leave civilization, crawling over mountains, reading meters and recording the results. I could do that for about 250K/year and be happy I think. Other than that, I have no other interests.
In: Depression · Tagged with: bi-polar, brain slow, Depression, job, unable to concentrate