Not all who are lost wander (pre-blog blog post)

I was searching for files on my computer related to Toothpaste Burger and I came across this college assignment which was to write a blog post about values related to my career. I completely forgot about this assignment. It will finally revel in satisfaction of any blog post's wish: to actually be a public blog post.

October 4, 2020

Before you say anything — no, the word arrangement of the above phrase is not a mistake. Rather, it is a clever manipulation to imply my point: although I may be lost in some areas, I do not wander randomly with no strategy. In other words, although I may not know exactly where I am in the grand scheme of my life, my direction is guided by my internal judgement system. A major part of this judgement system consists of my values.

My career is one area of my life where I don't have a clear vision of my path but do have an understanding of my direction.

There was a time in my life when I had neither a vision nor a direction. When I was younger, I had no clue what I wanted to be “when I grew up” — there were so many options to pick from! Once I discovered computer programming, however, I knew that this was the career for me.

During high school, I attended hackathons, which are 24-hour creative programming events, where the goal is to develop a project with a team and present it to the judges at the end of the event. After my first hackathon, I remember saying to myself, “If I enjoy doing this for 24 hours, I would certainly enjoy doing this as a daily job!” That statement inherently reveals a few personal values: I want the work that I'm doing to be enjoyable. To me, this means that the work is engaging and challenging, and forces me to constantly grow and learn.

So, based on that, the path is pretty clear, right? Work as a software developer for the rest of my life, since it's something I will most likely enjoy. My recent internship experiences have affirmed that I enjoy the work in all the ways I described above.

However, there's one aspect that I can't fully wrap my heart around (and this is where the trouble arrives) — the part where I'm doing this job for 40 hours a week, for the next 30 or so years of my life.

If I'm being completely honest with myself, my career, though it may be something I enjoy, is not a core part of my identity. Put simply, it's not how I would like to spend most of my time. I have a ton (seriously) of other interests and hobbies, and it would bring dissatisfaction to my life if I did not give myself the opportunities (and time!) to pursue these to their full extent.

In recent times, the list of interests is made up of: reading, cooking, exploring the outdoors, unicycling/juggling, creating my own coding projects, various forms of art (drawing, sculpture, piano), playing with video effects and animation, 3D modeling and 3D printing, and learning (about the world, how it works, and how we got here). I only see this list getting longer as I expand my interests and learn more. I highly value the diversity of my interests and the creativity that I often wield in pursuing them.

Some examples of the products of my hobbies:

3D modeled, 3D printed, and painted^[1]

A mobile game I created, entitled "Toothpaste Burger"^[2]

The time during weekends and a few daily hours after an exhausting 9-5 job just doesn't feel like enough for me to explore all these pursuits to my liking.

So, where am I going with this? I'm not quite sure. That's the part where I don't have a clear vision. What I do know is that I probably won't be satisfied with the traditional career path of: work aggressively until you're 60 and then finally have a significant amount of free time once you're retired. To get around this, some possible options I might follow in the future include some variant of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), digital nomadism (traveling while doing remote work), or living off passive income of a profitable side project. These possibilities excite me.

All that being said, another of my values is financial security. I'm not about to stop my career search and go live in the woods. I fully expect myself to continue the path of pursuing internships, and then working full time after college. The question is, how long will I stay there before I start getting antsy? (And maybe I won't get antsy — another of my values is flexibility. My future self might change his mind about all this, and I am okay with that.)

And so, while I may not know exactly where I will be or what I will be doing in ten years, I know what my next steps forward are. Being in touch with my values reveals those steps with clarity.

So, readers of My Blog, what do you think? Has anyone felt similarly? Am I just crazy? All thoughts or advice is welcome.

And, on another note, I searched Google for “Not all who are lost wonder” and came across some pretty good music.