Technological Midlife Crisis

For anybody who has been waiting for me to continue my work on scripting languages for DB4O, I am sorry to have dropped the ball. I find myself having a technological midlife crisis. Let me explain.

In a normal midlife crisis, a man may fear that he has married the wrong woman, or he may fear that he has failed to realize his potential, or he may make sudden impulsive changes in his life to take advantage of his last chance at a dream. He could question everything he has done, and feel that it has no value. That is what I am going through – not in the rest of my life, which has settled nicely, but in my work.

I dislike spending all of my time thinking about how things are done rather than why. I dislike being so involved in the details that I do not even think about why I am doing things. It’s all about how. How do I install Ruby on Rails on a Linux box? How do I use LINQ with DB4O? I like being able to do this stuff, but the how of it monopolizes all of my time and effort. I have been learning how to do this stuff for so long I am not sure why I ever wanted to do it in the first place.

Lately, my clients have seemed lost, too. They build systems because they have a budget, and just because that’s what you do to manage information. Right? I feel more like a digital janitor, sweeping bits and bytes from here, putting them there, and then I go home. At least a janitor produces something everybody can see. Nobody knows what I do other than the dissatisfied few who share my lot. Am I being fair to my coworkers? Probably not.

Nobody believes that we are going to build something great, nobody is even trying. It’s a job, and it pays very well. In fact, the more lost the client, the more money there seems to be for me. How many of us get stuck in places like this?

To be clear, when I say “places like this”, I do not mean a particular shop or project. That would be an excuse. The projects and shops I have ended up in reflect the metaphysical place in am stuck in. My projects reflect my state of mind. What am I going to have to show for this career I have chosen? I got paid for being good at what I do, but I never really achieved anything? It would be unprofessional of me to say anything about my current client, but I am getting very little out my work.

Even as I read about new approaches and technologies, I feel as if we are constantly improving the means to achieve the same ends. In fact, we are improving the means as a substitute for improving the ends. In the absence of something better to do we want to find betters ways of doing the things we have been doing. What has happened to the human imagination that it has given up on greatness and preoccupies itself with finding easier and faster ways to achieve mediocre ends?

Yet, I still have good days. In fact, my misery is more intense when I think about it than when I do to work and write code. Still, it’s a roller coaster ride. Sometimes, I feel that all I have to do is learn how to do this one last thing, or master this one last technique or approach, and I will be ready to contribute something beyond just keeping up with change. Sometimes, I fear I have grown tired of change just as it promises to take us somewhere. Wouldn’t that be something?

Yet, life goes on, and I continue to blog. Perhaps, one day, these feelings will resolve into a meaningful change in my career and work. Let’s keep at it.