January 3rd, 2023
I’ve been doing some reflecting and life planning and have some tentative stakes in the ground. To start this discussion though, I had written the following sometime early in Deember:
“I am really not enjoying life right now and I don’t know what the root cause is. I feel like I’m wasting away. I do think this is just because of the holidays. It always seems to happen that I get super depressed around this time. I don’t know what to do about it other than just bide my time until the New Year.”
I think the holidays are hard for me because I am not able to organize my goals and develop habits around achieving those goals. There are only 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is too much of a disruption, but also doesn’t give a proper runway to develop habits, especially since I have to continue to work throughout that 4 weeks. I have feelings about life and what I want out of life, but I don’t I’m able to do anything about them. I suppose I take the time to organize those feelings and figure out how to develop habits that help me reach the goals I want to reach. I wanted to outline some of my thoughts here to start the process of organizing and figuring out habits and goals. This will likely be a bit all over the place.
I am planning to stay with my current company until I’m 100% vested in the Employee Stock Ownership Plan. This will occur after 1,000 hours of work in 2024, however, I will only get a contribution based on my salary on 12/31/2024. I am framing that date in 2024 as the last day I would want to work for my Company.
Another thing related to this is that I will be the president of a local engineering volunteering organization from 7/1/2024 to 6/31/2025, and I will likely have an obligation in August of 2025 to give a presentation about the previous 24-25 society year.
I’m also planning on getting a Financial Plan done in 2024 at some point as I will be 30 years old. The last time I had one done I was 25 years old, and that helped me decide to work vs. pursue a PhD.
The main reason why I am mentioning all of this is that I am having a lot of thoughts about what I would rather be doing with my time away from engineering. I’ve developed an interest in anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as I am interested in the human experience, and I felt a desire to pursue an academic program in one of these disciplines (I was talking with someone and they shared a similar feeling and said that they felt they missed a class, I’ve felt similar). I think I want to validate some of the ideas that I have and be able to present them in a coherent, logical, and consistent way (I’ve thought a little bit about criticism and how that would crop up in an academic environment. Like, I have a feeling that it would take a lot of effort to overcome academic criticism for some of my ideas, or at least be able to provide a coherent response that I was comfortable with. I think this might stem from not having the skills to produce coherent arguments).
I’ve also had a desire to move to Europe, specifically Germany, as I think I would thrive in a European environment (I want to go on adventures and immerse myself into a new culture and explore the rich history, America is kind of boring in this respect, I also think this would help with weight management). I think most of this comes from “work”, while providing me with resources to pursue my interests, oftentimes not giving me the time to pursue my interests. I imagine that if I changed careers entirely, I’d find that that new work would be keeping me from my interests and I find a similar level of dissatisfaction though.
I’m also thinking that I would want to write a book as I have an idea that this would provide some amount of income, but I am still thinking about what I would want to write about and how I would want it organized (I do think that my writing so far has been good practice). I’ve also thought about starting a YouTube Channel, but again I wouldn’t know how to approach and organize it.
I think a lot of what I want to pursue boils down to dating and relationships. Something that I’m hoping to do this year is really understand my own sexuality as I think that drives to a large part the dating success and failure I’ve experienced. I’m hoping to develop an anthropological humanistic framework that makes sense to me which I think mostly stems from the shortcomings of the Christian worldview when it comes to sexuality.
I get the feeling that I would have to abandon my current standard of living and I don’t necessarily want to do that. I suppose I am just trying to find balance. I want to be able to move forward and be productive with the things I’m interested in while also not jeopardizing my ability to gain resources needed for survival.
Also, related to work, I have had a thought that work is, socially speaking, a dangerous community to build deep and intimate relationships. Entrance to and exile from this community it seems is determined by a small group of people that hold power over me and my environment. I’ve been thinking about this as it relates to human communities in general and how humans organized in the past (This is related to the anthropological interest of maybe developing and advocating for a type of community that is more compassionate to humans being humans).
In the here and now though, I have purchased yearly subscriptions to Wondrium, MagellanTV, Curiosity Stream, and Skillshare, to satisfy the need that I have for more intellectually stimulating content. I figure I can watch these things at work to keep from getting too bored.
I think what I really want is a restaurant-like menu, where all of the options I could have are laid out with prices associated for each. How I treat restaurant menus is that I decide on what I would really like, but also consider the prices of each item. Everytime I go to restaurants though, if I can, I try to change it up and get something new each time. This is kind of what the financial plan that I had done when I was 25 years old was. It was basically a menu where the two options were work or pursue a PhD. The high opportunity cost of pursuing the PhD is what ultimately made me decide to not pursue the PhD. If the two options were comparable, I might have decided to do the PhD. I suppose I want a menu that lists all the things I’m interested in and has the opportunity costs listed for each one. I would then be able to decide a path to go down. Suppose I get two years down the road with that decision and I want to do something else, I would want to look at the menu again and pick a new path based on what my interests are. Also, when it comes to food at restaurants, it’s easier to get something that I really want when someone else is paying. I still consider the cost and don’t go too crazy, but I also don’t feel that I have to worry about the cost as much as if I was paying for it.