“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.
I would often imagine a scenario where i was on the sinking titanic with limited lifeboats and if living meant dealing with other people onboard i would just find my corner and accept what is happening, does that make me a coward? would a brave man fight his way through people to find a lifeboat? I never completed this thought cause i did not care about its implications
We were Engineers! It was not my concern to bond or even understand humans, so what if they were from “different backgrounds or cultures” we are living in a time where knowledge is so readily available and requires no human in the loop
A senior once told us that one of the easiest electives to pick is Humanities and promised that we would not have to study much to clear the paper and so we did, but i remember a lot of people making fun of the lectures, quiping about how “its a joke of a subject” the first chapter was on morality and the teacher talked about how we should build software that is ethical, we laughed about it on the way back from class to our hostels, there are so many critical problems we face and solve when building software who the fuck is gonna look at the ethics of it?
Almost everyone know what we were taught was neither interesting nor important enough to care about, it was just an easy elective to boost your credit. I had enough creative juice to bluff out a 2 page essay on the implications of Morality 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.
We never really did engage in though experiments or explore existential questions cause someone could always answer them, either with a joke or a “solution” that does not care about implications. Everything had to be LHS = RHS.
We only went behind technical questions, cause we could not answer them unless we had it memorized, it would also be what chose our fate at the end of the degree, Existentialism took a backseat because it felt comfortable enough to listen to your parents tell you to focus on one thing: “Study hard now so you can find a good job and relax later” and hell, 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. How to relax now?
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.
During my first job, the HR asked to introduce myself in front of all my new colleagues, “So what do you do for fun?”, he asked and under pressure without having much time to think i blurted out “I like watching Tv shows”, later that answer made me very uncomfortable.
As a kid i used to write what i called “poetry” and the only thing poetic about that blob was that the last word used to always rhyme but i didn’t care, 5 year old me called it poetry. In my early teens i got more into writing short stories, we had this section in english literature where they used to start a story that went something like this: “A lady walked into the shopping mark and then she saw” our job was to finish it.
My teacher used to always laugh at mine and tell me “i can never understand how you come up with the most absurd twist to end the story” that was my signature move as a “teen writer” i would come up with an event that seemingly has no tie to the story happening and in the end somehow in my own absurd way add a twist so that it ties back to that event.
In the example where the “lady walked into the shopping mark and then she saw” i wrote a whole essay about how she had a shitty day so she is rude to this old lady and bla bla bla things happen she goes home, she is rude to her mom bla bla bla because they moved cities cause of her fathers job and she lost all her friends bla bla bla and then she goes to school the next day to realize that the old lady she shit on yesterday is the principal of the new school! Bam! Twist + Life lesson, I used to think that was some M. Night Shyamalan shit.
All of this came rushing back to immediately after i said “I like watching Tv shows for fun”
I realized that somewhere between English and Engineering, things went terribly wrong.
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 more aligned with my virtues. I leant to understand, feel and process my emotions in a much healthier way which made me a lot better in social settings and unknown environments.
I now know that I can use these tools to live a better life, not just a career, both will end at some point but one sooner than the other.