Mostly About Work

I am writing this on my way to Summerfest, so it vaguely counts as a skydiving post.

I’ve been feeling strung out lately. Strung out on work. Strung out from society’s covid-hangover. Whelmed that I’ve only barely gotten my social feet under me in SoCal despite living there for 9 months. Overwhelmed at trying to navigate the social skydiving scene of SoCal.

I’m tired, embracing the little things in my life that give me a little respite: my garden, my plants. The voices and songs of my hobbies and passions are echoing in my eardrums and getting stuck in my head. The melodies combine and harmonize; instead of hearing isolated songs these days, I’m beginning to hear a symphony. My heart sings a little song every time I visit my garden and drizzle water on my only dependents, my vegetables and herbs. The dry hot southern California wind hums to me as I empty my compost and turn the pile. I listen to books on tape about meditation and healthy diets and Native American biologists talking about Sweet Grass and our relationship to nature. All these topics might seem disparate but underneath them, I feel the rhythm of a synchronous drum beat. I’m tired from trying to figure out how to make these tiny snippets of song in my life into a unifying symphony to which my entire life is an accompanying dance. I’m tired of convincing others that these things matter, that the earth matters. How can plants, the earth, and environmentalism be less of a side-gig and more of the main attraction of my life?

I thought working for a mission-driven company was enough. But you can only ride the high of high-minded benevolence for so long. Even in a company that strives for mental health for all people through mindfulness and meditation, I feel aspects of my own mental health slipping. I feel like the world is insisting that I care about things that I simply don’t: HITRUST, rotated passwords, secrets management, default VPCs, and NACLs. I truly can’t care about HITRUST (HIPAA compliance specifications for software systems). Mostly, because I stop caring when it seems like short-sightedness and willful-ignorance trickles down from the top of the company, landing in a pool of wildly optimistic (and unachievable) deadlines, uninteresting work, excessive toil at my feet. I stop caring when I see lots of other employees fleeing. I stop caring when I see us, as a company, move in the opposite direction of my own person values. I’ve always valued the sanity of my coworkers, eliminating toil, and streamlining the process of moving from code on a laptop to a production level system of software. HITRUST is wearing down the team, creating toil and uninteresting, repetitive work. Unfortunately, the management has decided this is the new charter of my team. I have a hard time staying invested in something so… Utterly boring.

I only just recently realized that I’ve traded clear work boundaries for remote work and unlimited vacation. I’ve traded asynchronous email communication for always-on Slack messaging and on-call rotations. I never really feel like I’m done working. I never feel like I’ve done quite enough at the end of the day when I shut my laptop. It’s like chasing a moving finish line in the race of my career. Or with another race metaphor, it’s like running a marathon but no one can tell you the path or the possible routes to get to the end or even how long the race is. It’s like I’m huffing along, desperately waiting and hoping for that runner’s high, that state of flow, to kick in. I’m watching all those around me slip into flow, follow their passion, and seemingly enjoy their job. I’m watching jealously, and my steps are growing stumbling with the disillusionment I feel. I am once again so far away from the consumer, the user, the person that I’m actually wanting to write software for. I don’t care enough for software itself. I love what it can do for people.

Skydiving is, as always, lovely. But ever since I went through the XPG4 ordeal, I’ve been rather disillusioned and lost. I don’t have a clear goal. I’m trying to attend more events, test out new goals to chase. Project 19? Competitive static freefly? I had a taste of life at the top and I didn’t like the flavor it left in my mouth. Nor do I have a clear way to give back to the community. In Colorado, I organized tunnel belly events, did 1-on-1 belly coaching, and load organized. But now I freefly poorly and drift between DZs. I host no events. I have started to load organize again so maybe that will help. Maybe. But I am a still tiny fish in a massive pond here in California. What do I have to contribute?

I’m also not free to move about the cabin, in the same way I used to be. (Forgive me using an airline phrase. I’m currently on a plane, as I write this.) When you’re dating someone in the same discipline, I guess there are a lot of rules that didn’t exist before. I second guess all my social media posts on now: Am I too proud of accomplishments that are trivial? Do my posts suck? Does anyone care in a skydiving world full of influencers and a feed full of fomo? I never used to worry about that. I’ve never been one to worry too much about whether people like me either. (I always count on them coming around eventually.) But there’s another person who is tied to my reputation now. And I guess I oughta think of him too. While I can agree that an unexamined life isn’t optional, an over-examined life might also be the wrong direction. It sure doesn’t make me sleep any better at night.

But here I am, on my way to Summerfest. On-call blew up as I was arriving at the airport and someone had to sub for me, but I can’t exactly be bothered right now. I’m ostensibly on my way to do team training but really I’m just excited to hang out with some awesome ladies for a weekend. I’m just happy to be venturing out from home, out into the world, away from SoCal, where I’m not required to overthink everything.