what i'm doing

What am I doing? I hear this a lot, given that, you know.. I don't have a job and all that.

It's a little frightening and a bit disappointing to realize how much people confuse identity and self-worth and all that with one's job, especially once one has worked in the hive mind-esque confines of a corporation. We haven't evolved much in the past several thousand years; we're still looking to subdivide everyone into tribes, except these tribes have nothing to do with territory and blood relations, which might actually make sense. These tribes are entirely based on what sort of mindless repetitive tasks you're willing to perform and spend all your time thinking about every day.

It's also a little disheartening to realize how much YOU'VE bought into the whole "I am my job" bullshit, especially when you realize how much you've missed out on in life as a result.

Being out of the rat race for the first time in probably 10 or 11 years has given me time to think about what I really want and what's actually important to me. You'd think this would be an easy thing to figure out, but you have to also consider how much cultural brainwashing as well as knee-jerk reactions to said cultural brainwashing there is sitting smugly on top of whatever it is you really do want out of life.

So what do I want? What's really important to me, after all the "I shoulds" and "I musts" have faded away?

The answer: creativity, and service to the world. I want to be learning something new all the time. I want to feel that my existence has meant something to others.

And how do I propose to do these? I think I've finally hit on a solution, and it's been taking up most of my waking time.

I'm currently studying a whole truckload of internet-and-computer-related stuff, namely PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML, Python, and CSS (for the moment), because my eventual goal is to do freelance programming and web design.

If I can pull this off, it solves everything. I'll be able to support myself, but I won't have to sign my life away to some company that'll chain me to one particular location, tell me when I have to get up, when I can eat, when I need to go to bed, and force me to deal with people who have already given up on life for 8+ hours a day. I'll have the freedom to actually DO volunteer projets around the world, or to make music, write, and/or learn more of the arcane, delightfully binary, and human-interaction-free programming stuff I've been in love with since I was eight.

And, if the unthinkable happens, and I actually decide I want to settle down with someone later in life (not likely, given my current love of freedom, and provided, of course, anyone would even be willing to do so, ha), I'll have enough skills and experience built up by that time to get a nice, cushy, $100K+ job somewhere as a database administrator or something.

I finally finished Snow Crash, and before my free time turned into me sitting in front of my laptop with a disheveled semi-circle of books surrounding me, I was playing FFX religiously. Both of these reinspired me in terms of my computer-philia, for reasons I'll explain in some other post (must get back to work).

But, I don't know... I think this is a viable option, and probably better for me in terms of my basic makeup than anything I've decided to do in, oh, I don't know.. the past 13 or 14 years.