Questions, always questions
What is it that brings all of my interests together? Do I really work for the wrong side? Do I have a choice without making myself a pauper?
Questions swirl around in my mind always.
I’d like to have a fulfilling technical career. Barring that, I’ll take a fulfilling career… Story time: Once there was a boy (and he was only a boy) who thought computers were cool. His grandfather was an electrical engineer and the boy was giving a timex sinclair as a child by grandpa. During high school and early college (since the boy started college at 17) he played with computers, began running a BBS and got on the Internet a good five years before most had heard of it and years before ISPs existed. The boy was a slacker by heart and kind of fucked up so he didn't really learn to code much and was more interested in the social aspects of software.
Flash forward a few years, the Internet boom is just about to really start and the boy, now a man, is out of college and working a shitting job in a bookstore. He still loves computers. He still loves his BBS, the e-mail lists he runs, and computers. He is offered a real job for real money doing tech support because he knows modems like the back of his hand. A couple of years later, after beginning web work as a hobby and to support his other interests, he’s made into a webmaster and eventually he becomes a tester.
Now, I don’t need to say who this is because it is obviously me. I’m a test lead and I’m nine years into a career that I never expected to have. A lot of us from the old BBS days wound up getting sucked up in the rush and did tech work regardless of degree. It was my hobby and I loved computers. I find that I still love computers but it is a lot easier to forget that I started out as a hobbyist and only became a “professional” later. The days where I go to meetings, look at schedules and argue with my reports are the days where I wonder where I got here and how come I do this.
I've realized that I'd like to stay in tech for a long time. The money is good but I'm sick of a lot of the trappings and issues. Maybe it's time to knuckle down, learn a real computer language (or something close to “real” since I'm considering C#) and maybe contribute to things like LJ.NET to work on my skills.
Right now, I'm middle management and I'm not sure that it is really a skillset for success. That being said, people without any of these loose skills don't seem to go very far either. I guess that you need both.
Some of you are decade or multi-decade veterans of this industry. How do you survive year to year? Do you really build on your old skills forever or have you ever made a clean break and done something different?
On another note, I'm reading Boomeritus by Ken Wilber. It is his “novel” for his integral work. As a novel, it leaves a bit to be desired. As a general rule, I'm reading one fictional book and one or two “non-fiction” books (be it occult, philosophy, sociology or what-not) at a time. I try to move back and forth so I don’t feel like I work all day and then just escape into a novel at night. That being said, I'm counting Wilber’s book in the non-fiction category.
A lot of what he says about the “bad green meme” reads very true to me and he articulates a lot of the problems with post-modernism that I've always had. All truths are relative, except the truth that says that. Everything is based on context, except saying that. What I wonder is how to practically apply what he is espousing. He recommends, in the course of a number of his books, a number of modern writes on spiritual practices and the like. I've picked up used copies of a couple of those books recently and I'm going to try to work them into my spiritual work.
How to work a lot of this into the context of being an occultist is interesting. I found myself at times really wanting to let go of the straightjacket of being an “occultist” but I also don’t want to go in the opposite direction and be one of these meditators that focuses on the “spiritual” but doesn’t look at the implications for causing change in the world by any means. I understand that the western magical systems do allow for all of these things within them but you really have to dig for the contemplative side of things. Retranslating from Christianity or other modes of thinking into something more Hermetic or Gnostic is often a tiresome task. I’ve often thought that if I could do one thing, it would to leave behind myself something a bit more systematic and cohesive for those that follow me to work with. I try not to dwell on it because I don’t want to become the next Crowley and I’m not necessarily convinced that I have the spiritual gifts to pass anything on. I’m too much of a self-absorbed asshole at times to think that I necessarily have that much to add to the work of really great masters.
