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(The Day Before)
October 05, 2020
Tomorrow is my birthday, I'll be 42. I just realized this yesterday, I'm
notorious for forgetting this particular time of the year. Which is fine,
because my girlfriend of 3 years now never remembers it. But what she did
notice, this weekend, is that I'm miserable. I guess it's harder for me to
notice that I'm cranky, disconnected, and unpleasant than for her. Isn't
that strange?
I'm grateful to her for paying attention to me, because it was a
revelation. I just dislike my job. I don't mind programming, I just really
don't care about the end product. And I really dislike having to jump
through so many hoops, like a trained circus animal, just to get my job
done. A endless tyranny of processes and reviews and steps just to do the
simplest of things. The sucky thing is that I'm good at it, so my boss
keeps throwing harder and harder things at me, because nobody else has the
masochistic streak I have. And, it's just not good for me.
I don't know that I can every be happy as a worker, and I don't intend to
give up my life because of it. But I intend to attempt to pursue
happiness, maybe that'll make some difference. I took tomorrow off, and am
playing hooky this afternoon. It's time to refocus on me, because if I
fall apart, there's really nothing left.
EDIT: In two minutes after I wrote this, my manager detected I was unhappy
and tried to address some of these things. It's good he's trying, there
advantages to having an engineering manager that's a people person also,
we'll see how this goes.