Growing Up

Thanks to the rabid sprawl of social networking tools, I’ve gotten back in touch with a number of old friends lately - folks who haven’t seen me in five, ten, twenty years. I suspect I’m in for a lot of that this coming weekend, as I’ve got my 20-year college reunion going on.

I’m lucky - I look pretty much the same as I did then. Hair’s shorter, but still long-ish; it hasn’t thinned out much. I’m about the same weight. More wrinkles around the eyes when I smile, but that’s nitpicking. People normally guess I’m mid-late 20s.

So how have I changed? Basically, I’ve grown up. I doubt anyone expected me to, but it’s probably a blessed relief. Maybe not unequivocally good, but on the whole, yeah. I was less serious and had more fun back then. I avoided any sort of responsibility. I didn’t do long-term, capital-R Relationships. I didn’t plan.

That was fun in an easy-going sort of way, but it wasn’t sustainable. If I were still trying to live like that, it wouldn’t work so well. That superficial sort of fun gets old eventually, or it gets pathetic. Interesting work tends to come with some responsibility attached. And I wouldn’t have my awesome girlfriend.

So part of growing up was learning to take responsibility, not for its own sake, for some macho reason, but because that’s the only way things get any better. A lot of this started in my professional life and spilled over. I had always just coasted along through my work, even as far back as high school. Even when work became real jobs, I still pretty much coasted. I did what was required of me. I even thought it was pretty cool and interesting work. But I didn’t put anything into it. I pretty much graded myself on attendance. As long as I had a cool games/multimedia/internet software job, I was a cool programmer guy. I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to how well I actually did my work. Looking back on it, I sucked. I was the kind of programmer I hate now.

Eventually, something snapped. I think I know when it happened, but there wasn’t any cause I could replicate - no experience I could force on someone to make them better at their job. Essentially, I just stared caring. I discovered that my work was interesting, intrinsically, for the craftsmanship of it. And I decided that I wanted to be really good at it.

It may also have been a part of getting comfortable in my own skin. I wrote software for a living, but I’d always distanced myself from it - I didn’t want people to think I was one of those dorks. I did it for a living - it wasn’t who I was. I did cool stuff - I wasn’t a computer nerd; I was a media geek. I was into graphic design and fonts and everything. I even thought about getting out of programming. But again, something snapped, and I stopped worrying about being cool, and started caring more about being competent and respected at my work. Maybe I just finally figured out that this was something I did for most of my waking hours, and it was important to be good at it.

Again, looking back, it was a really good thing that I did. I’ve now been on the other side of the interview table, and I wouldn’t have hired the old me. Back then, I was always a junior programmer, and rightly so. And being a junior programmer in my forties would have been pretty sad, even if I had still been able to get a job, which would have been increasingly unlikely. Even back then, I was getting passed by younger guys who just cared more about it, who had a greater sense of professionalism. And I got resentful and petty around them. It’s a tough lesson when you find you can’t get by just by showing up and being clever.

Previously, I had hopped from job to job, always looking for something better, more interesting, or just new. Jobs were like any other relationship: At first, everything is new and shiny and perfect, but you gradually start finding faults. Things that were quirky and entertaining become annoying. Minor problems become major. Eventually, it’s time to move on in search of something better. The trouble is that no job is perfect. They’re all kinda broken. Sometimes it’s something you can live with, sometimes it’s something you can’t do anything about. A surprising amount of the time, it’s something that you can fix, or at least make better, if you’re just willing to dig in your heels and work at it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of figuring out how. It was painful to realize that that stupid old homily, about having the courage to change the things you can, the serenity to accept things you can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference, is in fact totally dead-on. And as corny as it sounds, if nobody works to make things better, they won’t get better.

Anyway, I started caring about how well I did my job. Then once I was doing technical work that I could be proud of, I didn’t want to see it go to waste because of problems with the management and business side of things, so I started learning more about how that was done. Caring about something in isolation led to caring about the context it was done in. Taking responsibility for making my little part better led to taking responsibility for making the whole better. And it wasn’t about control or power; I just did it because otherwise it wouldn’t get done. It’s like picking up trash - it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, but if nobody does it, it’ll stay there as a blight. Not only is it ugly in itself, but the fact that it stays there says that nobody cares about this place.

Ultimately, this grew into a better understanding of where I fit into the world, why I’m useful and valuable. And that’s a very concrete sense of self-worth; it’s not just because we’re all special and unique snowflakes. I do good and useful work that other people care about. It’s a much stronger and more legitimized sense of self-confidence.

In figuring out my place in the world, I got a much better understanding of how it all works. I started reading a lot more non-fiction. As a kid, all the stuff I read was very escapist - grand science fiction and fantasy. Now, even the fiction I read is about engaging with the world, not escaping it. Even if it is sci-fi or fantasy, it’s really about our world. It explores what could be, or should be, or what might be if we’re not careful.

But I’m also reading a lot of straight-up non-fiction, because the world is a interesting place and people are endlessly fascinating. Human society is just fantastically rich and complex, and has been for a very long time. History is mostly an attempt to make it fit into a story line - simplify this, emphasize that, gloss over the bits we’re missing - but really, it ultimately devolves into the individual actions of billions of people over thousands of years. It’s almost infinitely complex. There’s amazing stuff we’ve done - history and biography, science and architecture - and the world we’ve built - commerce and cities and cultures.

I’ve been reading a bunch about economics, because it’s like the physics of human society. Economics is only about money in the way that physics is about numbers - it’s just how you measure things. Really, it’s about decision making - in the narrow sense, how do people spend money, but in the broader sense, why do people do anything they do? Money is like gravity - it’s not the whole story, but it’s where things tend to go. I haven’t really gotten into finance, because that involves caring a lot more about the intersection of money and law than I feel is healthy, but I recognize its importance. It’s like engineering - anyone can design a building, but actually getting it built is phenomenally complex, and you need someone who can get you from point A to point B.

So maybe I’m still fundamentally a nerd - I engage with the world by reading about it. I still read a lot, but there’s a purpose behind it now. I take notes and I try to draw relevant connections to my own life and experience. I’m a better student in my free time than I ever was in school.