Sunday, December 21, 2008

Thoughts On The New Year

I've got two main, and somewhat conflicting desires towards for the New Year, and the future in general. Be warned this next bit is mainly me psychoanalyzing myself.

Firstly, well, I'd like to be more successful. To be interested in what I'm doing and good at it. For a good share of my life that's generally been the default, but since coming to college I've gotten a bit off track there. I'm nearly (hopefully) graduated from Stanford and setting myself up to be a software engineer for the immediate future. I'm not sure I'm completely happy with this. Since coming to Stanford, well, I haven't programmed anything for fun like I did in high school. I'm not sure why that is, but it's certainly not a good sign considering I'm setting myself up to spend the next few years programming 40+ hours a week. Coding is something I've stopped being interested in for its own right, and just something I'm doing to get somewhere, and that doesn't make for a happy career.

Now, of course, I never expected to want to spend most of my life being a code monkey, but I didn't quite expect this. I know a lot of people at Stanford who enjoy working with code a lot more than I do, and quite frankly are better at than I am. And I don't like that. I don't want to set myself up for something I'm only passable in and have to force myself to do.

To be fair, I've always wanted to move beyond the programming and work at higher level stuff Of course, I have to master the lower level mechanics and put in that hard work, but I still feel off track. After the years at Stanford, well, there's not that much foundation level that I really get into anymore. Software, math, econ etc. What am I left with? A couple of sociology and philosophy classes?

I'm trying to figure out why this is. It could still be getting used to competing at the level I'm required to with the Stanford folk, that things just aren't that easy anymore. A fair bit of it could be the stress brought on by that. Then there's the chance that a good share of what's going through my head at the moment is mild depression related stuff. Of course I've already been diagnosed with that once and am a good bit better off than I was then. But beyond that, still need to find some project or goal for that drive bit. And then maybe the additional bits of better caring for the house, getting out of Palo Alto more often and not sleeping all day will come along.

Which brings me to the other half of my New Year's goals, that I should chill out and worry less. As my friends keep telling me, chill the fuck out. An example of me worrying excessively about something is the first half of this post. Also relating to the first half of the post are the mild depressive symptoms such as worrying about the world to the point of sleeping to avoid it, avoiding my email, etc. A lot of my friends say they don't imagine me stressing that much, but there's a lot I'd like to get rid of. Hmm... not near as much to write on this topic, I suppose it's fairly self-explanatory.

Well, there we go making some progress to having more concrete New Year's resolutions.

1 comment:

  1. I bet things get easier when you finish up at that suckhole of enjoying your work that is Stanford.

    ReplyDelete

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