The pursuit of career

Hmm, I’ll write a blog to warm up for my essay.

So, life is interesting and complicated. One of the things people sometimes do in life is enter careers that involve doing jobs. A question arises: What kind of career would I like to do?

I like science a lot. I think that, at a philosophical level, improving the level of mankind’s understanding of the natural world in which we all find ourselves is one of the greatest pursuits there is — here we are, some mammals sitting around wearing clothes sometimes, and we spend years figuring out what the heck everything is and how it got there. Almost as amazing as the fact that anything got there in the first place. (I think Stephen Hawking is a well-known proponent of essentially this idea.) And my favorite branch of the sciences is the science that deals with most of the universe: physics (and astronomy). Understanding the whole universe seems like an extremely ambitious goal, but people have made such big achievements already in figuring out what exactly is out there, beyond the Earth. Space is cool! And the mathematical relations (i.e. laws of physics) that most “stuff” on and near Earth follows seem to hold true throughout the visible universe, as far as we can tell. For me, the idea of being a part of this process of figuring out how the universe works is both extremely appealing and intellectually engaging. This is why I’d like to be a scientist.

Learning how to understand the awesome stuff that we see in the universe is really satisfying

But, hmm, sometimes becoming a scientist is hard, and maybe in real life it’s not as cool or satisfying as it’s cracked up to be. When I come to it, maybe the actual experience of being a scientist is tedious, unrewarding, and takes too much grant-applying & dealing with bureaucracy, and not enough exploring & appreciating the wonders of the universe. If I were to choose a career that I enjoyed, even if it didn’t have the philosophical benefits of being a ‘man of science’, what would I do with my life?

Hmm. I think I’d go into some form of software development. I don’t have too much experience with programming, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of the coding I’ve done so far in my life, and I would love to be able to apply computer skills in creative yet practical ways. In fact, video game development (nerdy as it may sound) has always been a bit of a dream career of mine, and though I suppressed it through most of high school (primarily due to the fact that, at the time, I couldn’t code worth anything even when I tried), a recent videogame-oriented CS project rekindled my game-dev interests.

See, I’m not a very efficient person when it comes to things like “doing work”. I slack off a lot, and I really like to play video games (although I am not what you’d call a “regular” or “hardcore” gamer). I don’t know much about psychology but I do get a real nice feeling when I am just kicking back and playing video games; I get a lot of satisfaction when I play video games well. (This probably means I’m over-conditioned to get happiness from the box, or “validation from the machine”)

Like this XKCD

Funny thing is, I think I get the same “validation happiness” from developing games that I do from playing them. What a great career that could be!

But I fear I wouldn’t really be satisfied, in the long run. Do I want to give up the search for wonder just because I found something I can do that is a lot of fun? Who knows. This will be a long-term thought process for me, and I suppose only time and experience will give the answer. Maybe going forward with science plans is too masochistic; maybe ditching it for video games is too immature. For what it’s worth, the work I’ve been doing for my research advisor lately has been really engaging, particularly now that I know how to actually do anything with the damn data. If this is what science could be like forever, maybe I’ll love it and my fears will be unjustified. Hmm.

We’ll see.