What's the Point?

Again I find myself asking what the point is with most things that are available to me. Like, what’s the point of working? And of course I don’t mean in the sense that my mom would take it. She would simply answer “to make money and survive”, which is of course a valid answer on one level. And it is definitely a valid answer for me as well — I’m not financially independent by any means. But I have options. There are multiple job opportunities available for someone with my skills and my background. So I guess a more specific version of the question, and what I’m really asking, might be: “What’s the point of working with anything in particular, as opposed to something else?”. I sit there for eight hours and focus my attention on expressing the code required to build this or that feature. It’s a scrolling list. It’s a game. It’s an audio player. It’s a toolbar with this or that fancy functionality to help users experience something profound or easily reach the most important information. In the end, isn’t it all the same? I code something that anyone could have coded, and it is released to just another user who could have used any other app. But we tell ourselves that ours is the most important one. We are changing the world, and we need to push ourselves. We need to be “in it to win it”, we need to be hungry and keep pushing. Keep pushing ourselves, and keep pushing new code. Fixing bugs, it’s urgent! Don’t you dare lose that sense of urgency! This is really important. But it’s not as important as that other thing that we just realized, because that one is actually really really important. Oh never mind, this other thing just popped up — turns out it’s really really really important! Well, three “reallys”, that takes the prize. Dropping everything else. Feeling stressed that I wasn’t clever enough to fix this already. Feeling stressed that whatever I release today will still be behind schedule. The management has already set a deadline for three hundred other features, so yeah how nice of you to finally ship this feature that we already saw the demo of two months ago when the UX guys had a wireframe in place. Ok so maybe it’s just software development in particular that has come to seem pointless to me? But no. When I think about other professions, they seem equally futile. A hairdresser just cutting the same hair over and over again. A builder just building new things that are really the same. Even “important” jobs like surgeon or firefighter. Ok, so they help people. And then what? Does it make a difference if they would not help people? I guess people would not be helped then. And then those people could not carry on doing the same old things. Wow, when did I become so cynical?

It seems that the goal of life is comfort. The important jobs help people stay comfortable. Successful people can be comfortable most of the time. Success itself is measured by the level of comfort acquired. So let’s say I reached the highest level of comfort. Would I be done then? I don’t think so. At the same time, there couldn’t really be any point in suffering itself, could there? I think it all comes down to something else entirely. Suffering or comfort, it doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is the purpose. So what is the purpose? It cannot be comfort itself. If comfort is the purpose, then life quickly deteriorates into nothingness.

I think most people don’t even reflect on their purpose. They work hard every day to get just a bit of comfort. And they never get so much comfort that they have to face whatever is behind it. They don’t “churn”, as the term would be in the gaming industry. If a player can be prevented from continuing playing before they have had enough, they will keep coming back for more. I believe that if more people would actually reach that state of having “too much spare time”, then they would realize how empty their lives really are. Now they are just too busy to see it. A consequence of the realization of the emptiness would probably be depression. This might be one of the reasons that unemployed people often get depressed. They drown in the sea of comfort.

For me, it didn’t happen quite like that. I was not comfortable. But I still realized my life was empty. I knew that behind the crust of “being busy” was a bun of pointlessness. Some time during the winter of 2017/2018, I passed the point of no return. In the spring of 2018, I quit my job at a fast-growing start-up to join a small software consultancy firm. The reason was simple: to find purpose. It didn’t work. I was more lost than ever, and was fired after five months or so. It was then that I dipped my toe in the ocean of leisure. At first, I felt freer than ever. Then, as I was more and more submerged, it became hard to breathe. I was selected to join a start-up generator after just a couple of months of nothingness, and again I felt a fresh breeze of purpose under my wings. But it faded quickly, as I realized that the start-up world is a shallow one, perhaps even more shallow than the regular one. So I left it, back to my vast volumes of convenience. Then I stumbled upon a job as technical interviewer. I thought I did well for a while, but then after 180 interviews or so I was fired from Pokemon because they thought I had treated one of their candidates really poorly. I couldn’t believe it. I was distraught. I watched the video and saw my normal cheerful self trying to help a candidate get to the important parts by gently moving them along. I had been condescending and stressing the candidate, they said. I had talked to them like to a child, they said. What the crap. And so I feel lost again. The only job I have been able to find any pleasure in for the last two years. And it turns out I don’t even know when I’m being condescending. I have always had much self-doubt regarding my performance as interviewer. I have battled it. I have tried to be resilient. I have tried to believe the positive feedback from candidates and mentors in the past. But now, it’s just hard. I have been looking for other jobs to complement this one for months, but haven’t found a single other lead that I might be able to bear. So now, when I feel like fleeing from this one, I just have no idea what to do.

The only thing that makes sense to me, for reasons I can’t even explain, is disc golf. It is always worth it to throw that plastic disc. It’s utterly pointless when you think about it. But it is virtually the only thing that keeps making sense to do anyway. I can’t explain it, but I don’t have to. This is extremely rare. Usually, if I cannot explain to myself why I should do something, I immediately lose all motivation to do it. But with disc golf, there is this whole other level of beauty that trumps my logical mind. I want to play more. I need to play more. I need to lose myself in the game and watch that disc fly. It’s so beautiful. Could I make a living from it? Maybe that’s what I should start exploring. Could I become someone that works in the disc golf scene somehow? I don’t know. But I have this funny feeling that it would not be pointless.