@bryce.purpose.succ()

As my services will not be required much longer at my current employer, I need to figure out what to do with myself next.  This is a complex and important decision, and thus requires a moment of reflection.

Let's start with the big picture.  What do I want out of life?  What is my motivation for, well, doing something rather than nothing?  Like all descendants of mitochondrial Eve, I need to keep my belly full, my body warm, and my Internet working.  That requires certain resources which are most easily obtained by exchanging money for them.

But that doesn't feel like a pressing concern right now.  While I'm not totally satisfied with my current material situation, it does have the advantage that I could probably keep it going for eighteen months before my bank balance dips to zero.  Yay for voluntary cheapskatery.

To keep this post short, I'll scale Mt. Maslow in a single bound, straight up to "self-actualization."  What do I want to become?   What problems should I be engaged in solving?  What bits of creativity do I want to send out into the world?  In short, what do I need to do to protect this fragile delusion that I am a useful person?

A few options, off the top of my head:

Back to school!  Dust the cobwebs off the ol' thinker, try to remember how to analyze a function's algorithmic complexity, read up on the latest research to find out whether P ever ended up equalling NP, and get back to what I was meant to do:  create swarms of killer quadrocopters.*

Put solar panels on ALL THE THINGS!  This is the route my parents seem to be pushing me to take. Learn the solar installing trade, then get out there and start a small business.  The idea has its merits...


Occupy everywhere:  Take some time off to do some political activism.  Maybe get brutalized by a police dog.  I'm not sure that fixing the world one tear gas canister at a time is a sound strategy, but it beats sitting around watching things fall apart.

In my mind, the two worst problems the world is facing right now are global warming and the corrupting influence of money on politics.  In some ways, the second is much worse, because it keeps the first problem -- and a long list of other problems -- from getting solved.


Ramblin' Man:  Take some time off to see the world (or whatever parts of it I can get to without spending large quantities of cash).  India and China are tempting places to visit.


Find interesting words and put them in interesting orders:  I'm a decent writer.  Possibly decent enough that I could maybe make a living writing fiction.  There's something sexy about the writing occupation: sitting around Internet cafes and sipping black coffee, signing books for doe-eyed fans, getting suicidally depressed, drinking yourself into an early grave.... yeah, that's the life.

The thing is, it sounds like a tough full-time gig.  Not the sitting around and typing things part, but the getting paid for the resulting word salad part.  Nobody seems to know exactly how to make money at writing these days.  There are lots of paths to try, from self-publishing on up, but no clear paths.  Also, these days shameless self-promotion seems to be an absolute must.  It's not enough anymore to let your work speak for itself, but I don't think I'd be much good at that side of the business.

Still, I have tales I want to tell, and working full time leaves little time to tell them.


Code4Life:  And oh, yeah, there's this programming thing I know how to do, which I might be able to leverage into something world-changing or at least lucrative.  The problem is, I'm way too picky about the projects I want to do, the technologies I want to use, the design decisions that end up getting made, etc.  I'm rarely happy doing somebody else's project somebody else's way, and with coding jobs you can rarely expect anything else.

I seem to have run into the Buffet of Life problem.  Everything looks pretty good, nothing really stands out, and my tummy is only so big.  But I gotta to eat.

It seems I have a couple of months to decide.


* Oh, fine.  Let me google that for you. [link]