With my role now being global due to a person resigning, I am getting a "little bit busy" with tasks and while it is only a temporary situation until another person is hired and trained, that is still a six month process, unless an internal transfer, where it would be about a three month process instead. So regardless, nothing much is going to change anytime soon.
Admittedly, I am a little concerned with the way it is going to roll for me, as I have been somewhat committed to plans I have made with people in the past and had new ones already announced for Q4, but with limited resources, there is only so much I can do. Essentially, I will be forced to "go back on my promises", where even though it is understandable, that isn't what people will *actually understand. However, if I do manage to pull all of this off, it should give me significant collateral salary negotiation in the future.
The walls might be closing in, but that doesn't mean there isn't opportunity, even though sometimes it feels like there is the Dianoga from the Star Wars trash compactor, circling in the waters.
I don't plan on being eaten.
While it doesn't necessarily sound like a lot of fun to have this type of work and responsibility (and it is not), there is also the sense of challenge and sense of achievement that comes with it. While we all likely work for the money, there are other values that we apply to the work we do too, and at least there is the potential for accomplishment and fulfillment at some level of our hierarchy of needs. Perhaps on Maslow's Pyramid, it might come into the Esteem and Cognitive layers, and perhaps even some of the Self-actualization stage.
It is important, isn't it?
Not the theory, the feeling that what we do in this world matters, even if it doesn't matter much. At their core, most of our jobs are busy work in the sense that they are not necessary for us to survive, but rather, that they support an enrichment of experience past survival. Much of the wealth generated by businesses comes down to entertainment, where the supply chains from start to finish, wend up producing something that is just for non-survival consumption. We of course have styled our lives around surviving using these things though, so that makes them "needed" in the sense that we have become reliant on the tools we have created as a species.
Yet, while "we as a species" have created a lot, the 99% of us will create nothing of the sort, where we will spend our lives as endusers of the products and services, not their developer.
This is the way of the world though isn't it? It is the way evolution works, where one minority evolves in ways that the majority do not. In the case of technological evolution where it builds tools however, the "rest" can evolve too, by learning how to use the tools created by others. And even then, there is some kind of sense of skill and accomplishment in the using, even though nothing was necessarily created at all.
The challenge as a human these days is that there are so many options available where we have potential, that it is very difficult to narrow down to what is our "full potential". Everything comes with a very wide range of opportunity-cost, which means that we are continually missing out on something, no matter what we do. And, because of the constant reminders of society, we feel that we are missing out too, raising all of the disappointments and fears that come with the known loss. Even if we are completely happy with what we are doing, we know that there are other things we could be doing in its place.
What if those things would be better suited and increase our potential?
It is an eternal question and as self-aware humans with the ability to consider the past and predict the future, we are born to continually suffer, we are designed to never have all we need. It keeps us evolving, because once we have one new tool, we are able to use it to change something that was unchangeable prior. Before flying to Mars, we first had to make it off the ground.
For most of us perhaps, our dreams are not as large as some, but we all dream of being something better than we are today. No one wants to be worse. The form this takes and the way we consolidate it psychological differ, but humans are made to progress, made to evolve and because we are social in nature and can build tools to help each other, made to collaborate in the process of our own evolution.
The way we meet our personal needs and what we set as goals change, but I am yet to meet a single person on earth who is truly content with all they have and never want for something else. This is lucky of course, because if we were all happy with what we have, none of us would have any jobs at all, other than the things we need to do to survive - but would we be fulfilled?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
