Karma's a bitch

  When I was a child I was playing with my friends and solemnly declaring that being 40 is terrible and that we would never ever want to reach that age. Now I am 49 and... well, yes, I was a bit right... but now I am considering my next moves in my life. Things like "I've worked so hard so far, now I should enjoy the fruits of that labor" and "Maybe I should switch my career to something completely different" and "People have started a new life at 50 before".

  And it would be easy to dismiss the fanciful exuberance of youth and shrug it off as something from the past if it weren't happening it continuously. The universe, with its wonderful sense of humor, makes me revisit a lot of my past edicts, whether they were positive or negative, and forces me to consider the opposite as true. All the damn time!

  Am I smug about something like having hair on my head, perfect vision, being a good software developer and so on? Hah! God laughs and makes me bald, needing glasses and destroys software as a business in just a few years. I guess with all of those jokes about software developers being gods we had it coming, like poor Nietzsche. Do I dismiss command line tools and npm and Vim and the Linux way of life as masochistic when you have smart tools like Visual Studio that work perfectly with a wonderfully designed .NET ecosystem? Everybody goes Node.js and Python and color terminals. Do I feel pride in my mental sanity? Then... oh, wait, that hasn't happened yet. Or has it?

  In a way, this is something people have praised in stories: the opportunity to rethink your certainty and revisit your beliefs, to learn from life and turn intelligence into wisdom. But it's also such a waste... you get to understand things when you are out of time and energy to do anything with it. Should I become a teacher? It never works. Youngsters don't listen, they need to experience. I've been there, I know, and I was a nerd, not a bad boy. And it's not even the end of the road. Past wisdom routinely gets revealed as hubris, delusion or wishful thinking. Also stupidity.

  I did mentor people and it felt good. Some have even been grateful for it and felt that it helped them on their path in life. Yet every time someone asks me if I am prepared to mentor at a new job I am a bit reluctant. Am I smart enough to teach anyone anything? Will I make or break those people? I am perfectly happy to peer-to-peer knowledge, but a position of authority such as "mentor" feels wrong.

  Do you know I now want to find a job with an office? When everybody was going to the office, I was praising the wonders of working from home and lamenting the lack of such opportunities and how much time one wasted on the commute. Now that so many people do that, and I myself did it for six years, I want back in the office. And not even for the usual reasons people want that (i.e. getting away from their families) but for the sheer pleasure of socializing and being amongst people. If you know me even a little, you should find that extremely amusing.

  I believe people crave a stable identity that is also successful. Yet that almost never happens, especially now, when the world is being pulled from under our collective feet. If you build and cement your principles, you are labeled as stubborn, inflexible, maybe even pigheaded, and that even if those principles do fit reality and bring an advantage. A person who changes their world view as it suits them is "a leaf in the wind", untrustworthy, hypocrite. And in these times of intense polarization, people who have lived enough and were smart enough to gather some wisdom, see both sides, weigh them for pros and cons and think for themselves, those people have become the enemy, the dreaded centrists who can't choose a side and give their lives for the cause.

  Some folk have the great fortune to be born in power and wealth, surrounded by people telling them how wonderful they are and how they are never wrong. They are never forced to grow in any significant way. It's stable, it's successful, but it doesn't work either. The human brain finds a way to feel shitty about life anyway, find drama and conflict, something to complain about or brag for no discernable reason other than to make other people feel worse.

  What good even is wisdom, if all it shows you is that nothing is permanent, very few things if any are even real, that there is no purpose in life but the one you create, that everything has at least two sides that contradict each other without any of them being false and that our efforts are ultimately pointless, even if within our lifetimes they can be heroic and awesome and inspiring as well? It's a complication no one seems to need!

  Is growth supposed to lead to happiness? It doesn't feel fun when one is forced to grow, yet it does feel pleasant when the growing is done. Like sport. I always hated sport. Probably I will have to start doing that.

  As I write this I am looking at my dog. I don't know if he is generally happy, but I've seen him extatic and joyful and sad and determined and lazy and comfortable and anxious and scared. Can he explain why he felt all of those things? Certainly not. Can he think about it later on and decide on better responses? Doesn't seem like it most of the times. He does look regretful when doing some stupid thing, but then that is how people interpret it and he could just fake it. Right now he is sleeping next to me. That's important to him, to be next to me. If I leave for another room he will wake up and follow me, ask to be put on the sofa or whatever, then resume sleeping. My dog doesn't feel karma is a bitch, he doesn't strive to become better or understand the world, he just follows his instincts and emotions and enjoys the hell out of them. He seems content to love and be loved. Is love all we need?

  I know I am not saying anything revolutionary here, it's not even structured thought, it's more of an emotional journaling thing. A lot of other people have examined this better and to no definitive end either. I always thought that we humans are just smart enough to realize how stupid we are. Maybe that's the ultimate cosmic joke, to be pushed to think of problems that we have no ability to solve, feeling dumb while doing it.

  My instincts are telling me I should either wait and do absolutely nothing, or push through and reinvent myself. In other words, wait for the world to make sense again or push to make sense of the world as is. It's hard, because I've had half a century of training for a different life. Also because I am lazy, as a developer should be. In a sense, we've reached the pinnacle of software engineering by designing something that will do all our work for us. We overlazed ourselves. Maybe that's the answer! I should just lazily enjoy the rest of my life... ah, damn it, I am married!