I did pick up Surface Details after finishing Hotel du Lac, but there was a bit of a gap imposed by a book my boss gave me to read. Mindset had some interesting ideas. It's too bad they weren't all that interesting to read about. That book was boring and repetitious. I've read a bunch of library ebooks on my phone over the last couple of months, but I have made zero progress on Book Shelf Zero. The purchase of Matter actually put me back one book.
This failure to make progress on this long stated and surprisingly long term goal has me fairly unmoved. Moving beyond reading to check a book of a list is a nice development. Feeling pretty blah about the entire enterprise is a little less heartening. I've been working on making the pursuit of arbitrary goals a less significant part of my life, but I failed to work on figuring out what I put in place of that pursuit. Life's been feeling a bit on the drab side recently. Well, parts of my life anyway. The parts of my life where the ambition to distinguish myself in either real or more delusional ways are what have really suffered. I create pursuits like Book Shelf Zero to give me a channel to spice up my life around folding the laundry, taking kids to school, and sitting through endless meetings about the details of various projects. My job used to be a place of meaning and ambition. It's not really doing much of that anymore.
It would be very fair to say that the last year of my work life has been challenging. Challenging projects and the evidence of bad leadership are part of that challenge, but the absence of discovery, exploration, and getting to the core of a new problem are what have really been dragging me down. I thought it was dealing with a new role, a new boss, and constant organizational uncertainty (all of which are certainly part of the issue), but the variable with the really big coefficient is the absence of a side project where I get to explore and discover. When I look back at periods of my work life when I felt very engaged and rewarded, I was working through a problem with an answer that wasn't obvious. I'm locked in constant process issues right now. That's suffocating. At least it's personally suffocating. This is the path for career success.
I'm not so interested in career success at the moment. I want to do my job well, but I'm not sure higher levels of responsibility are for me. My job is never going to be my top priority. My family and personal pursuits are always going to be more important to me. Research problems are closely aligned with my personal pursuits. That's how I've extracted more than minimal efforts into my job. Do good enough on the stuff that has to get done while doing my thing on something I find interesting that's also meaningful to the company. The independence of those activities was a huge part of their attraction. I could pursue my intuitions and questions without having to convince others that this was the prudent choice.
I can do the organizational stuff. I just don't find it particularly interesting. The signs of boredom have been popping up all around me. I sit in my living room playing Tetris 99 rather than going to work. It's not the game that's keeping me here. I'm avoiding going to work. If it wasn't Tetris 99 it would be reading or doing something like this. It's my small rebellion. I'm tired all the time, working out from habit and pretty much going through the motions, and spend more time thinking about going to Disney World than the projects I'm responsible for at work.
So I'm at a bit of a professional inflection point. There will be no speedy resolution to this one. That organizational turmoil is not going to be resolved anytime in the next several months. So I can keep moping around being depressed about my lack of autonomous (but still business relevant
) research or I can seek out ways to get more of what I need from my current role. I need to do the role I'm in now. It's a transitional state into something new and different. I would be happy to go back to my old kind of role in a more senior role, but I really don't want to report to the guy I reported to before. I had more autonomy as a bench scientist than I do as a Sr. Manager (that's a cruel truth to corporate life, the more organizational power you hold, the less free you are to pursue things that are interesting to you). Finding my own thing will be challenging, but I have one or two ideas of what might work for me.
I really just need to stop letting my dissatisfaction with my job from investing other parts of my life.
