Rui CarmoBeen back at work for a week and am actually not terribly excited about it. In fact, the running joke bouncing listlessly from neuron to neuron is that it took me most of the week to wade through enough notes and e-mails to remember what my job actually is these days.
But one of the main reasons enthusiasm has ceded ground to some despondency, a modicum of restrained acerbic retort and an increased amount of cynicism is that after two weeks of sleeping late and mostly not using computers I am now trying to go back to getting up at 6:30, which is murder for me in winter time and tantamount to a week’s worth of jet lag so far.
Another likely reason is that the past two years are finally catching up on me and what I am actually experiencing is either a form of cabin fever or the burnout I thought I had been successfully skirting throughout. Either way I look at it, it’s just another thing I’m coming to grips with besides the perennial struggle to find meaning in the tech industry. The latter has knocked on my door before, I just managed to stave off thinking about it for a good while.
I do know what I like doing and have a few ideas of what might be fun for me to do next (I already do some advisory work and have even found myself in the middle of a few media and gaming discussions). And it is hard to deny, on face value, that I would probably have been much happier spending the past two years either doing physical labor of some kind or just coding instead of doing management work and a dozen video calls a day.
But whenever I contemplate that a part of my mind keeps screaming at me to act my age (which happens to be ancient in technology donkey’s years) and just go head-on into senior management or business development already.
None of these feelings is entirely accurate, and yet I do feel like the holiday break pushed me through a threshold of sorts, so I guess it’s time to binge read and wait until inspiration returns.