Hi
This first post is here to set the stage and explain why I'm blogging and what topics readers can expect to encounter on this website.
Motivation
I feel a general, mild sense of unease underlying the emotional currents of my everyday life. Like coasting along in a ship and catching a glimpse of some large shadow flickering into view for a split second underneath the cresting wake of your passage, leaving you questioning whether you imagined this shadow, or if there really is a threat beneath the ocean waiting to destroy you. It might just be a feeling from that broader category of existential dread that produces mid-life crises and whatnot, but there's a chance I have been running away from the opportunity to sit down and answer some definite questions about my life.
That is, this blog is primarily for me to think through the questions that occupy my attention, conscious or subconscious. To that end, pen and paper would suffice so there are some other reasons for the public blog. I admire people like Maria Popova, of The Marginalian, and Scott Alexander, of Astral Codex Ten, who publish long form content online. They write well, about topics that resonate with me as being meaningful, and I think that they have benefited from engaging with their communities through the internet. Although I have no expectations that anyone other than myself will read this blog, it seems worthwhile to me at the outset to at least leave open the possibility of others reading what I write. It's also an exercise that might help me grow a thicker skin. I don't think I write very well, but having the courage to write, and think, in public will help me do more writing and hopefully, improve that writing.
Topics
I was, and still am conflicted about this website's URL containing my name. It feels a little egotistical, but I had been sitting on the domain for a while and figured it would be faster to get this thing going to use that rather than wait until I came up with a snappier name for the blog with a corresponding domain name. In a similar vein, I'm shy about directly talking about myself, but it's useful here.
Last year, I left my job as a site reliability engineer at Google because of a perfect storm of burnout, poor job fit, and a rough couple of months emotionally speaking. Thanks to the years I had worked in the lucrative tech industry, I had the financial runway to keep the lights on for a good amount of time without needing to immediately seek employment. I hoped to work towards understanding more clearly why I felt what I felt about that job, and to have a better plan moving forward to be gainfully employed doing something that was more meaningful for me.
So likely topics include:
- the tech industry and things like innovations, skills, and ideas in that domain
- philosophy relevant towards exploring my own search for meaning
- hobby related posts (personal coding projects, video games, drawing and design)
Quite a few of my friends and acquaintances who work or have worked in tech have shared similar sentiments about burnout. Funnily enough, multiple people have specifically expressed the desire to quit their white collar, high paying jobs and take up farming. I think there's something endemic in the tech industry, at least at the large FAANG size companies, driving people away, or convincing them to quiet quit. Who knows, it might not be unique to tech and this is a specific manifestation of a very human reaction to the whole "life is work, work is pain, suffering is inevitable, meaninglessness is unavoidable" outlook that we can fall into, independent of our specific sector. Probably worthy of a separate post.
Hope to write soon,
Mason