“Can you talk to them?” My mom told me on my first day of Uni “Figure out where the Hostel blocks are” I hated that question! not the one about the Hostel blocks, I walked around for 20 minutes looking at buildings and figured it out.
I have done worse things to avoid talking to people. Back then I had just one social circle. My only friends group at the time came about because we had common friends back from school and spoke the same language, I found it hard to bond with different groups, It was intimidating and I used to feel uncool and unwanted, my friends ridiculed me for even trying.
We were Engineers! It was not my concern to bond or even understand humans from “different backgrounds or cultures”
Never even thought about this until we picked a Humanities elective in college but it was a joke, what we were taught was neither interesting nor important enough to care about, it was just an easy elective to boost your credit without studying.
We were arrogant. Anything non-STEM was beneath us and the people who did it only did cause they weren’t smart enough.
These kids never did ask existential questions, only technical ones, it felt comfortable enough to listen to your parents tell you to focus on one thing: Study hard so you can find a good job, that felt like a good enough purpose to follow and it was all fine until we actually did it.
I studied hard and got a good job.
You are taught to question things but for me it was much easier to refer to an FAQ than come up with the actual questions. I lived in an idyll where solving “high impact” problem statements by building abstractions on top of the gazillion existing ones somehow makes me superior.
I got buried in abstractions very soon and quite easily.
It got to a point where the only people i enjoyed conversations with were other engineers, I had inadvertently moved from one bubble to another.
Getting back into non-technical reading wasn’t easy and shoutout Covid for giving me just the right amount of existential angst.
Studying Humanities gave me a different kind of joy, not the one you get solving math equations or leetcode problems, well that is joy too but here the abstractions were far too less and the solutions felt more real, it felt human.
I pushed myself to travel, explore, put myself in difficult situations and figured out solutions in realtime, I learnt a lot more about myself and got so much better at making decisions that I felt aligned with my virtues. I understood emotions and got a lot better with people.
I feel like I could use these tools to live a better life, not career, both will end but one sooner than the other.