I wish the thoughts would coalesce…

My mind is going several different directions:

• History and politics
• Work
• My personal future
• Writing

I’ll tackle the last one first because it illustrates how intertwined all of these disparate trains of thought are. I have been watching a lot of historical documentaries lately, mostly on the history of the United Kingdom (specifically, the Stuarts, Hanoverians, and Windsors). The primary reason for this is because I have a vague understanding that there was Henry VIII and then a bunch of shit happened, and then Elizabeth II died. Somewhere in there was the Victorian era. I’ve been curious to fill in the gaps, and the documentaries have helped with that. My gosh, so many Georges and Edwards; it’s difficult to keep them all straight. Also James-Charles-Cromwell-Charles-James. Nice palindrome there.

I digress. Where was I? Oh, right, writing.

In the way a lot of these documentaries do, they’ve got the obligatory “old guy writing with a quill and/or fountain pen on parchment” scene over and over, and one of those clips (which was repeated several times) had the most gloriously blue ink I’ve ever seen. It was scintillating and blue, and it made me really want to write with it. So, I found a place that sells fountain pens (who knew there were so many varieties?), ink, and fancy paper (it’s cotton!). Since today was payday and I actually have money left over in the budget, I ordered them all and hope to have them soon. So, many of these ramblings might well end up captured on fancy-cotton-paper instead of here, but we’ll see how that goes. I tried journaling a great number of years ago (over a decade) and kept up with it for a while but then lost interest. Frankly, typing nearly 120 WPM makes it much easier to keep up with these scatterbrained throughts than the ponderous act of writing (let alone legibly), but it is actually my hope that the effort involved will inspire me to be more discerning in my choice of what to put to paper.

Also, shiny blue ink. My gosh, they had a lot of varieties… and that was just the blue ones. They had nearly equally many red and green ones, but I soon got decision fatigue and decided to stick with one color (well, okay, 6 different shades of one color) for now.

I’ve digressed again. Oh, right: history and politics. Although my opening remark on this post could be interpreted to refer to the bulleted list above, I actually expressed it with specific reference only to the political thoughts going through my mind. As I have been watching history documentaries (and also Jon Stewart), I have had this growing sense of… something… lurking in my subconscious. I firmly believe (or perhaps I’m just fooling myself) that I’m subconsciously piecing all these bits of information together into some kind of holistic solution for the country’s woes. Yet, it remains infuriatingly out of grasp, like an eye floater that peeks into your peripheral vision then hides as soon as you look at it. I had hoped that journaling about it might help me combine those thoughts, yet my fancy paper isn’t here, yet, and the urge is getting uncomfortable—like pissing but with more philanthropy.

So, here goes. What have I learned?

• The notion of “individual responsibility” used to refer to a more general sense of the expression, e.g., Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”; it has become a rugged, self-individualistic expression that seems to have been used to discredit welfare and the plight of individuals.
• While someone should take responsibility for oneself at a minimum, there is also a duty to one’s peers, neighbors, and country as a whole.
• ¿Porque no los dos?

I’m beginning to think of a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but for duty. At the base, we have—well, the same as Maslow: the bare necessities to keep ourselves alive.

Above that, we have the individual responsibility to take care of ourselves for our own sake. Moving above that, we have the need to take care of ourselves not only for our own sake but for the sake of not wanting to burden those around us. I am not convinced that this distinction is necessary beyond the fact that one is selfish (looking out for myself because I don’t want to starve) while the other is duty-based (looking out for myself because I don’t want others to be put out).

Beyond that, we have the need to take care of others close to us—our family units or pets, for instance.

Beyond that, there is the urge to serve a broader range of people. I’m not sure whether the is need to differentiate between “community” and “country” since both consist of people who might be strangers, though “country” certainly embodies a wider variety of strangers who might not even share a similar background.

All of this is well and good, yet I myself have not advanced beyond “take care of myself and the herd”. Well, that’s not entirely true…

This is where work ties into everything. As I’m fairly sure I’ve mentioned on here before, I am not a fan of being in management. It is boring, tedious, and largely thankless. I do not get the “huzzah!” of my team completing projects because life is an endless stream of projects that are past-due and that we are scrambling to complete as fast as possible while cutting as few corners as we can. I have been very eagerly awaiting the day when I can go back to being an individual contributor, when I won’t have to deal with all this crap anymore. (The mental gymnastics of going from calculating resistance values in a circuit to identifying the resource needs for the next six months’ worth of projects is… breaking my brain.)

Yet, I received feedback last week that has given me significant pause.

One of my employees is on loan to one of our sister companies, and apparently it is rather dysfunctional. This employee told me last week that it is evident how much effort I’ve spent planning and figuring out who’s going to do what so that the team can be effective. It was, I think, the most resounding expression of appreciation I’ve gotten from the team itself. My boss-turned-peer has always been supportive (I wouldn’t have taken the job if it weren’t for that), but I’ve always had a fairly icky feeling about being in my ivory tower, issuing edicts to the team—whether they liked it or not. From that standpoint, I had no compunctions against reverting to being an individual contributor because I know that “no man is irreplaceable”. Yet, my goal has always been to pave the way for the team, to give them as smooth of a ride as I could, and the feedback I received gives me the impression that perhaps I’ve succeeded more than I thought. If that’s true, then will the next person also strive to make things as smooth for the team as he or she can? Frankly, my own experience says “no”. I don’t think I’ve had a single manager who actually liked managing. Well, maybe one. My first boss was everything I wanted in a manager: he could give me work to do if I needed it; he could help me if I was stuck or didn’t know how to do something; and he left me to be productive otherwise. My second boss (well, I had 7 at the time, but the main guy) was on a power trip and remains my least-favorite boss of all time. Most of the rest have been fairly lassiez-faire; I didn’t have much of a relationship with them (in some cases despite working together for years). I don’t think that any of them would have put in the effort I have to try to keep the team running smoothly, and I worry that my team will suffer under someone without that drive, yet as an individual contributor myself, I will be powerless to help it. That is the thing that’s got me thinking about helping others, and it’s got me in a perplexed state.

Of course, my dad’s advice is to get out. Then again, his advice was never to get in in the first place. Yet, I have learned from this experience, and I don’t actually think things would have been better had I chosen not to go into management. Truth be told, I expect we’d probably still be floundering and looking for appropriate direction, yet my boss-turned-peer and I would not have the relationship that we do now, and I would likely have moved on in frustration from lack of clear purpose. And, it is that fear of lack of direction that has given me pause. It’s true that there are other powers working within the organization, now, though: we have a product manager for the first time ever, which is great. We have needed someone like that, who can take the inputs of the various stakeholders and condense it down into an actionable, prioritized list of projects since before I started. And, it is my hope that once that role is up and running (the person is new to the company and is still learning the ropes), we will at last have the broad direction we need to set a course and charge towards it. From that standpoint, as long as the person who replaces me can convert that into directions for the team, we can still function. Now, that person will most likely not be decomposing the project into tasks as I have done, will not be populating the metadata for each task that is required by upper management. That means that additional overhead will fall on individuals, which will hamper them some but hopefully will not be overwhelming.

And yet, it’s in doing that decomposition, filling in metadata, doing all those tedious steps so that the team doesn’t have to, that I’ve provided what I believe is the greatest benefit. It is tedious—make no mistake about that—yet because I take that on, the team doesn’t have to deal with it. They can look at their backlogs, know what they’re working on, log time to their tasks, and focus on getting the job done. Without me to do that—I am 99% confident that the next person will not do that for them—they will have to take on that additional workload. There will be grumbling, but they’ll make do. Certain individuals will be more fastidious about it than others, and there will be nearly constant need to nag the others to fill their information in correctly. That will eventually come to a head, and either the individuals will be given an ultimatum, or upper management will have to do more with less metadata. Given the data-driven methodology they’re trying to instill, I doubt the latter is likely, but I’ve been wrong before.

I feel like I’m harping on this too much. It won’t be the end of the world for the team if I don’t stay manager. There is someone within the organization that can give them the direction they will need. There’ll just be more bullshit to deal with.

But, circling back to helping others, I’ve been thinking about the ways I can help, and I am convinced that it somehow involves politics, involves bringing a service mindset and a systems background to civil service. The more I look at the various things ailing the country, the more I see their interconnections. I begin to see everything as a giant system whose boundaries and interfaces I have not fully enumerated, let alone defined, but viewing it through that lens, I begin to wonder whether there is a systems-level solution that has not been seen at the individual levels. Poverty, racism, inflation, cybersecurity, scam calls, immigration, wealth inequality, the rise of artificial intelligence, political polarization, and hostile foreign powers… it all seems to “fit” when pieced together correctly, and wouldn’t it be something if there were some solution, inspired by something as out-of-left-field as cybersecurity that suddenly addressed poverty? These are the types of thoughts that are bugging me. I’m beginning to see the interfaces, but not clearly. And, every time I try to look at them head-on, they vanish. It’s mentally strenuous, and watching YouTube videos is so much easier. Yet, even those keep putting more puzzle pieces on the table, keep tickling that subconscious part of my brain that I really would like to bring into the conscious.

I think that I have the right mindset for what a civil servant should be: open-minded, service-oriented, and eager to bring in a bunch of experts to help me solve the country’s problems. And yet, I’m so discouraged because it seems like such people seldom survive politics. Even if I could get elected, would I become a target of violence for lobbyists who can’t bribe me? Would my animals? Would my family and friends?

And thus I’ve hit all the bullet points: I don’t know what to do with myself. My “gut” is towards being an individual contributor, yet I feel impelled towards service—be that towards my team or my country—but that impulsion is thwarted by cynicism, and I don’t know whether to fight to overcome both the cynicism and the obstacles in the way because it’s somehow “morally the right thing to do” or take the easier path—like my dad suggests—because it’s what I like, and people can do more when they enjoy doing something. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” on one hand, yet on the other, what if it’s just vanity and false pride, and those end up hurting my loved ones?

I so wish the thoughts would coalesce…