I’ve always tried hard to make everyday living work smoothly and in a timely manner. My number one option so far has been staying in Finland where the infrastructure is good and things are well out-of-the-box. Everything is bloody expensive, but for that money you get a reliable road network, tolerable bureaucracy and very low corruption rates. Things just… work.
I’m sure you already know what India is like in this regard. I may be rich here, but it doesn’t make everyday life as easy as in the civilised world. I could spend my whole salary on domestic help, bribes and everything, and still be a long way from the quality of living Finland provides. So this is not the place I want to settle down in.
The problem with both Finland and India is that I’m heavily dependent on the infrastructure and other people. A lot of stuff I do requires electricity, special skills, buying something or travelling somewhere. Things are really complicated, and on top of that I have to sacrifice more than half of my daily time in a job that doesn’t give me much more than money. While it’s nice to have a good salary and a “good” job, I don’t find satisfaction in the lifestyle anymore.
The following two paragraphs may seem irrelevant to the ones above, but bear with me for a while. I’ll try to explain in a moment.
The nature of the problem is the same as in video game industry today. In the 1980s anyone could buy a C64, learn how to write code and put up a semi-decent gaming experience in a couple of weeks. Twenty years later, it takes a team of n+1 professionals, expensive development tools and at least a year (or something?) to put together even the tiniest Xbox Live Arcade game, not even mentioning “real” games. One man creations are really few and far between, and in a bigger project you can easily find yourself doing something completely meaningless just because you were told to do so.
And this is the exact problem I have with the Corporation. I worked on a project for two years, saw a prototype of the end product once (not in action), and the whole project was shot down shortly after that. Two years well spent, thank you and here’s the next one. Motivation, anyone?
The common denominator of these topics is the lack of personality and individuality. Being just a faceless part of a huge group – be it a company or a nation – just doesn’t cut it for me. I know I’m an individual person with my friends and relatives, but being a greedy bastard, I want to be one in other contexts too. This includes the ability to create something meaningful by myself and keeping my work in touch with the real world, not just fiddling with bits & pieces that are useless without hundreds of other people.
And that’s why I intend to change careers after this assignment, even if it means that my income will be cut by 90 per cent or so. I know there are endless possibilities out there, and life is too short to be spent on something I don’t like doing. IT might have been fun once, but it’s time to move on already.
Tags: friends and family, luxuries, money, planning, prices, ways of working, why I wanted a change, work
