❤️‍🔥 What Do I Want to Be?

“Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you will wake up and discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly you are old. Didn't happen, and it never will, because you were never going to do it anyway. You'll push it into memory and then zone out in your barco lounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life.”

— Vincent (Tom Cruise) from Collateral, 2004

I'm a student who has time to learn about what interests me. Paul Graham's essay on When To Do What You Love sums up my dilemma perfectly:

When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously:

1. You don't know what makes you happy
2. What the various kinds of work are really like
3. How well you could do the work

The problem with becoming a software developer was that I knew about #1 and #3, but #2 surprised me. I didn't realize how much work like incidents, sprint planning/stand ups, and weekly check-ins would be involved. Not to say that it kept me from doing a good job, just stuff that generally detracts from an engineer's experience.

When I was a dev, I was happy financially, but not personally. Now, as a student, I'm personally satisfied, but not monetarily. Notice how the title of this post isn't Who Do I Want to Be?; I already know that 😉

Out of my current options of being an entertainer (comedian), software developer, leader/entrepreneur, or writer, being a developer seems like a good choice.¹ I also realize that not all companies have the same hardships as others, but most do. Paul also said something about company culture that resonated with me during my time at Neo:

“One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?”

I can safely say that my colleagues back then were much better than me, and that's why we became good friends. I only become friends with people who I look up to.

This blog is a platform for me to gain knowledge about myself; eventually I will discover what I like by writing about it first, as I need to try it out before I can make any judgments.

I already have drafts on all sorts of topics I'm unfamiliar with, like Rust, leadership, PWAs, macroeconomics in South Asia, camera lens distortion, philosophy, cybersecurity, etc.

Why not use university courses to discover what interests me? Because most academia sucks the joy out of learning because many professors don't care.