Chaos vs Lawful

 A lot changed around the time that I hit 40. I was in a good place at that point in time, because I was living in Mexico and had a good job. But in retrospect things were falling apart. There were issues that I had been putting aside, and a few years later, those issues would come and bite me in the ass. I wasn't growing in my job. I had bet heavily that I would embark on a tech career, and that would be the way for me to go. There were a lot of fundamental incompatibilities with a tech career. To be fair, those were issues that would cause me problems in any job, and that's why I never shifted away from a tech career.

I never truly figured out why I was in that place. In some way, I wanted it both ways: I wanted to have fun and I wanted to advance in my career. These are two pretty incompatible goals. One is more juvenile, and the other is more grown-up and sober. If you want to have fun at your job, you can do it, until that job no longer becomes fun, and then you'll be in trouble. You're going to have to enter a long term relationship with your work.

There were a few things that I was losing, and those things would be highly consequential. The first of those things was the ability to square having fun with doing my work. If your work consists of a few fun programming challenges, then yes, it's possible to have fun in your work. But sooner or later, you're going to be presented with the more serious, sober stuff, and you have to learn to live with it: you have to be more serious and more responsible. You have to see to it that things happen. You have to react to things. You have to be on call whether you feel like working or not. And if you can't grow into this life and learn to appreciate it, it's going to drag you down. The second thing I lost was this sense that I was progressing into something that was worth looking forward to: I was losing my optimism, and related to that, I was losing my sense that there was a future. And the third thing I was losing, and this happens to everyone, is my youth.

You have to be able to answer when asked: what makes you happy. It's not really a good thing if you're scratching your head over this. In fact, I think one of the reasons that midlife is so awful is this: a lot of your great moments will come when you experience something wonderful and new. In the middle of your life, those moments will become far and few between.

There is this thing called “alignment” in dungeons and dragons. People are lawful, neutral or chaotic. I'm either neutral or chaotic. There's no way that I'm lawful. I may be neutral, and I'm only saying that because people who are good at maths are probably not chaotic. I always liked a mess. I was saved, in my younger years, by having more orderly people around me. In college, maybe things started to fall apart. I took courses simply because they had nothing to do with my major, and did very little to try to sew them up to something bigger. I liked movies in which nothing much happened, and people were just experiencing the textures of life. I avoided engineering work like the plague, although I made an exception for computer science. I liked Eastern philosophy mumbo jumbo because it offered a respite from what I considered to be the suffocating rationality of the western intellectual tradition. But when the time came for me to shape my life into something – anything, it was hard to do. I just wanted little adventures, diversions. A marathon. A grad degree – not a doctorate, which would become my life, but a masters. A few years in California. Dreams of being a musician (and I would argue that at least I learnt how to write music).

I'm a person who wants to be funny – well it was easier in the past, because my favourite forms of humour are pretty juvenile. And when I reflect on it, wanting to be funny is pretty feminine because it's not too different from wanting to be pretty.

I don't know if I've told you, ever since I was a kid, I've dreaded adulthood. I've written a school play, and it was about dreading adulthood, and it was modelled after “A Separate Peace”, which is also about dreading adult hood. It's so ironic that that play had an anarchic heart, given the sheer amount of planning it took to put that thing together.

What's going to happen in the future? I don't know. As I said earlier, my first years of adulthood were miserable. They were miserable because all of a sudden, I was starting from zero and no longer being a gifted kid who only had to show up and get serious and then I could get all the As I wanted. They were miserable because I knew my career was basically stalled and I wouldn't be in management anytime soon. They were also miserable because I knew that if I were to switch places with my boss and sit in the manager's seat I would be equally miserable. It was the classic “damned if you do and damned if you don't”. So right now, I have that “I was miserable when I was jobless and I'm miserable now I have a job”. That can't be the case. My life has not much momentum but it has momentum, and I have the chance to build it to something bigger. But I need to figure out what that something bigger is.

That time when I first started work at Mexico, it was literally a dream come true. I had arrived at a situation I spent years working towards. I was in a job that was – in the beginning at least – fun. The first miserable years of my worklife were banished to a memory. I was about to embark on what at that time I called “late or mature adulthood”. There would no longer be any failing to meet society's expectations gnawing away at me. And that was until I realised that actually meeting society's expectations wasn't that much fun. And if I get my shit together now, I actually get to be a data scientist, and that was something that I even failed to do in Mexico. (Admittedly I have to figure out whether I really love being a data scientist or I just love the idea of it). A lot of the good times were all about moving out of those first few years of my work life, moving past that dark time. But I'm starting to wonder if there was any more to it than just that.

There is a time when you just have to focus on taking it one step at a time, and that's what I've been doing. And after that I have to progress to stepping back and seeing the bigger picture. Everything I ever achieved during my first stint I had to earn it one by one. I started out with no prospects, no friends, ended up picking up basketball, and having something vaguely resembling a happy life. Things will have to proceed in a similar manner this time around. Except that work this time around is actually tougher and harder. But this time, the vision of a “mature adulthood” will have to be much clearer, otherwise it will turn out to be a mirage.

I've made decisions in life, to the extent that they could be called making decisions. Many times I've opted against the more mature, responsible decision. It's more mature and responsible to be in the Maths team, I ended up immersing myself in pop culture. I could have tried to be a great scout, I preferred to run a show, and when I did run a show, I was not up to the task. I avoided taking on responsibility in national service. I used to be proud of the fact that I took classes from 30 different departments at Snowy Hill, but now I'm wondering if that hampered me from really going in depth into anything. When I was at work, I was involved in many different types of projects, but I avoided the leadership / management stuff. At University of Mexico, I could be forgiven for a lack of focus, because it was basically one long job hunt for me, although I'm wondering if not even trying to get into a PhD program was a wise decision. And at my workplace in Mexico, I can always point to a few things over a couple of years where I shirked taking forward steps, leading to 2019 which was basically one long, drawn out process of getting me fired.

After more than half a year at this job, some things are starting to be clear with me. If I'm asked to do a data science job, I'll be OK. Not fantastic, but good enough. If I'm asked to do project management, to go around the stakeholders to manage how things will be done, if I'm asked to do project management, to become the link between the coder and the manager, it will be like pulling teeth. I have a better idea of my weakness. I've been criticised for not being outgoing and meeting people, but that's just a part of something bigger. And it's not something that I can wish away, not something where I can say, “let's find some work that doesn't have to do with that”. It will affect everything. I can't think of a career where this is not going to slow me down. I've spent more than 15 years, as well as my entire childhood working around this problem. Singapore is a country of managers.