What is your definition of a good days work? I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Engineering has a tangible definition, You push out a new feature or maybe fix a couple bugs! That’s great but did you think? Have you questioned the ideas you assume to be true? This is getting increasingly hard with autonomous agents taking over our life. You can spend days on autopilot and still feel a sense of fulfillment cause you have developed a muscle memory for it. Okay, but do I think outside of work?
As I was writing the earlier paragraph, I opened Youtube and watched a couple videos of the subway takes guy telling me how to feel about something and I really believe him. Something has caused my brain to develop this incredible aversion to thinking. You know, the thing that makes you human. Why should I even bother sitting and thinking though? The world is overstimuating and I have already spent enough time fuguring out how to make what I need to live a life of comfort. I have job that demands work from me but not thinking, And after work i can always watch something from my Letterboxd list. I am not thinking because its not helping me anymore but I can always do it when push comes to shove. I know what you are thinking, you think I can do it right? Well I am gonna prove it to you. I will do that by sitting down and writing this before getting swung into distractions that now exist all around me.
Why am I talking about this? Well you see, recently I started a research internship which is quite different from engineering. I am used to coding my way out of problems and I have been an engineer for a long time, before this time a different person existed, in school, a teenager. I barely remember him but I know he was obedient and timid. I feel bad for him as I think of him in third person but one thing I know to be true: He was curious, he was willing to think and his thinking made him so uncomfortable that he forgot who he was.
At Research, there are no sprints, tasks and results, Forget result, there is sometimes not even a problem statement. Just something interesting, something worth spending time thinking about, poking around, scratching your head. Failing to understand, running completely in the wrong direction for weeks. Reading, More reading than doing. More understanding than building. This is how engineering felt like in the beginning, when i was an intern 6 years ago, this is what work that makes you think should feel like and work is supposed to make you think.
Now I really believe that this is how life is supposed to make you feel. Aren’t feelings research questions? Why does something make you mad? We are never taught how to complete our thoughts and keep jumping between infinite ideas. I am really looking forward to being uncomfortable again, maybe this time around I won’t completely forget who I am.
No part of this was written/ polished/ touched by an LLM.
Leave a Comment