The last six months have… sucked. The day after I went on hiatus, Casper died. Kitty disappeared three days ago, and I probably will never see her again. And yet, after all the philosophy I’ve read, the most profound, soul-crushing realization I’ve had is…

… None of it matters. In 20 to 30 billion years, the universe will end, and no matter how great we humans think we are, we, too, shall perish. Of course, that’s the optimistic outcome: most species on Earth only last a million or two years, and we’ve already burned up about 300,000 of those. So, what? What does it matter if I or anyone becomes the next Napoleon or Alexander the Great? What difference does it make if humankind advances so far as to be incomprehensible to modern-day humans? In the end, even if we prolong our existence by half a dozen orders of magnitude, the universe ultimately has a full stop waiting for us.

This realization has been, by far, the most painful. Don’t get me wrong: the loss of Casper still hurts six months later. Every time I go to bed and wish the girls good night (since he was the last boy), I still feel a pang of loss. And now, with Kitty gone, I can go back to calling them “the herd” since there are no non-equines left. It sucks. But what puts it in perspective and mockingly denigrates the very real sadness is that for all the sadness and loss I feel, it’s not even a speck in a universe whose existence is itself nothing more than a tiny dot in the vast sea of eternity.

More than once, I’ve considered that it’s not worth it to watch this inevitable game play out. But, Mom got diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and I can’t bring myself to inflict more pain on Dad, who is already struggling under the pressure. At least they’re moving to a home where he will finally have some help. Or, when I’m not thinking about Dad, I’m thinking about Ebony and Ivory, who still deserve to be cared for, even as their companions slowly blink out. It feels hopeless. Work feels like… well, you know what they call a boat, right? It’s a hole in the water that you pour money into. Well, work is a hole in my free time that I pour effort into. After nearly 4 years away, fate has caught up to me and cornered me back into a systems role. I left my last place to escape this fate, and yet… here I am. Put in 15 hours on Monday, and another 12 yesterday.

Incidentally, I last saw Kitty on my way back to the house Tuesday morning at 0100. She was cute and enjoyed being petted. And then I woke up the next morning, and she was gone. “Easy come, easy go”, they say. She showed up out of nowhere; I loved her for a little over a year, and now she’s gone. At least, I guess I can say that I got the best of her years, when she was young and cute and affectionate and energetic, not when she was old and crotchety and run-down. Best years or not, I sure miss her…

I’ve spent the last six months trying to find motivation to work on projects that I just can’t be bothered about. Spent thousands of dollars on one of them and got it within feet of the finish line, and now… I don’t care enough to put in the extra few hours it will take to get it done.

I’ve also read a lot. I read a lot as a kid, before middle school, when Watership Down proved toxic to my love for reading. I read much less after that. But, starting around November-ish, I started reading a lot of philosophy, mostly Plato. It got pretty dry. Then, I started thinking about how that might relate to politics and the absolute shitshow that they’ve become, and in the last few weeks, I’ve started reading on that. Finally, after 6 months, I have the beginnings of a plan as to something that could save the US from itself.

But, so what? In 30 billion years, it won’t matter. Whether we devolve into a new stone age or fly out of the solar system, it will, inevitably, end. It’s hard to care about anything when you realize that nothing matters, that in the grand scheme of things, no matter how noble your cause, it amounts to no more than the basest of pursuits. I have realized that I hate those empty pursuits: the watching YouTube mindlessly, the buying stuff I neither really need nor really want just because it’s something to do. I hate the fact that I go to work not because there’s anything I’m passionate about but because there’s nothing better to do and because I do still find eating preferable to the alternative—even if it’s just the same, tired food I’ve eaten a hundred times. It feels as though my life has been subsisting on empty calories, eating cake and bread and sugar for so many years because there wasn’t anything more substantial on offer.

Yet, in the last few months, I’ve discovered that I’m not alone. Not a single person I know feels energized about life right now. Not a single person feels like there’s a grand purpose to life, and yet I’m certain none of them have been reading the same philosophy books I have. I’ve realized that this feeling seems to be pervasive, that whether people recognize it or not, it’s there, this insidious, noxious miasma slowly choking us all. I’ve realized that this isn’t even new. I thought originally that it was a Trump thing, but then I started looking further back in history, trying to figure out where it started. I realized that it’s been this way my whole life. I have suspected for a while now that Trump was the symptom, not the disease, and the more I study it, the more convinced I am on that front. People feel disenfranchised politically. That in itself is a problem, but when you add to it that people feel left out from the goal of life and don’t even know what that goal is in the first place, and it’s corrosive to society. Trust in institutions has eroded, and Trump managed to capitalize on that, hastening their demise for his own benefit. But why did trust in institutions erode in the first place?

Things were not always this bleak. There have been times in US history when people really were fired up about life and truly proud to be Americans. The 1950s were a good example. The space race was in full swing, and gosh, people were proud to show those commie bastards what-for. Before that, it was World War II. The US entered the war, and my gosh, the industrial might of this country! Every man, woman, and child was focused on a single goal, and it was then that we really established ourselves as not only an international presence but the world superpower to beat. Even the Great Depression, as awful as it was, seemed to galvanize people towards a common goal of beating Nature (and her dust storms) and pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps… with a big helping hand from The New Deal.

One of my most recent feats of reading comprehension was The Federalist Papers. My gosh, that was dry, and yet there was something so nice in seeing logical arguments put forth, supported by contemporary and ancient history as evidence, and (mostly) devoid of the toxic ad hominem attacks, baseless fear-mongering, and xenophobia from today’s rhetoric. I realized that 250 years ago, there were some crazy sharp people trying to figure out how to build a country using pieced-together bits of government that seemed like they might work. The hundreds of pages of analysis, of risk mitigations, of thinking through the worst-case scenarios that went into justifying the Constitution before it became the supreme law of the land… it’s humbling. 250 years ago, undistracted by TikTok or YouTube or getting likes, our Founding Fathers were a sharp bunch. Not only did they conceive of conditions that had never existed before, they put safeguards in place to prevent the worst! They say that “good science fiction predicts flying cars; great science fiction predicts traffic jams”. What does it say that Hamilton and Madison were already thinking (figuratively) about automated traffic management systems when the automobile hadn’t even been invented? That’s not to say their prescience was flawless, but they were awfully sharp nevertheless. 250 years ago, how could they have known that a series of unrelated events could have led to the slow degradation of the safeguards they painstakingly put in place through sheer ignorance of those breaking them down, with the ultimate result being that someone like Donald Trump, the very antithesis of the “wisest man elected by his peers”, would end up in the Oval Office with a legislature and a Supreme Court largely beholden to him? (In that one instance, oft-repeated throughout the Federalist Papers, I found myself shaking my head and saying, “Oh, you sweet, summer child”. Hindsight is 20/20.)

I hated Of Mice and Men, yet I can’t help quoting its namesake: “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Our Founding Fathers could not have known the convoluted path we took to get here. Then again, they also could not have known that, less than 300 years later, the US would have swelled in prestige from a backwater thousands of miles from Europe (“the only place that really mattered”) to dwarf that whole continent in wealth and influence. It makes me think that if people today focused on the future the way they did 250 years ago, maybe things could be better for us now, and certainly later.

What if…

In about 100 years—just a little over one lifetime—the US went from building the first mass-produced automobile to landing someone on the moon. The moon. Ancient peoples thought the moon was a god, a celestial being, not a place, and certainly not a place anyone could actually go. 100 years. In the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, that is 0.03%. In 0.03% of our existence, we did the unthinkable, and we were able to do that because we were coming off the high of WWII, putting our industrial capacity to work on a singular goal: beating the commies to space.

Who cares if it was a silly dick-measuring contest? Who cares if the only people who go to space now are rich billionaires? At the time, it was a cornerstone goal, providing a bedrock of resolve for every man, woman and child and a clear objective against which every decision could be evaluated: “Will this get us to space sooner? If so, we should do it; if not, we shouldn’t.” Of course, the civil rights protests were happening, too. Also Vietnam. But let’s ignore that for a moment.

What if we had another goal like that? What if, instead of feeling like we were just burning up our time doom-scrolling because there was no better way to spend our lives, we all felt like we were part of something.. Even if that something wasn’t the most practical thing. I spent 16 years focused on getting a house and land. It was, in hindsight, a petty, selfish goal. And yet, it gave me an unshakable sense of purpose.

But what if our common goal were the most practical thing?

Let’s go back to Vietnam. It was a huge waste. Frankly, so was Desert Storm. One could argue that every war-not-war we’ve had ever since has been the same: a huge drain on US lives and coffers, and what have se got to show for it? Iraq and Afghanistan are back in the hands of tribal warlords. Israel is determined to take Palestine by force, and Putin is still trying to conquer Ukraine. China is itching to take Taiwan. So much strife, so much suffering, and for what? In 30 billion years, absolutely no one will care who controlled Palestine or Ukraine or Taiwan or North America. Nobody will care because there won’t be anyone around to care.

So, why are we wasting our time and resources on this? What could lead someone to choose to prioritize that over, say, a comfortable life for himself, his friends, his family, everyone he knows, everyone in his country, and everyone everywhere?

You know what leads people to that kind of violence? Adversity. Poverty. The insecurity of knowing where the next meal is coming from or whether the house is gonna get blown up while you sleep. I am afraid of getting stung by wasps, so I poison them. I use violence because of fear of injury.

But, flying, stinging insects aside, why do we put up with poverty? Why do we put up with homelessness? The US is, by all measures, incomprehensibly rich compared to just 100 years ago, let alone the Middle Ages, and let alone ancient Rome. What if everyone could live like an emperor? The average US citizen does already, but what if everyone could live that way? What if, instead of dog-eat-dog, we started looking out for each other, for our environment, and focused on lifting all boats? Utopian, socialist bullcrap, probably, but seriously: why not? The US did not become wealthy because it had a king. It became wealthy because a lot of people busted their asses, trying to make better lives for themselves and their kin.

In 1000 years, the biggest innovation in medieval Europe was the printing press. Not throwing shade on that; it’s a big achievement, but in 100 years, we graduated from hammering out cogs and flywheels to flying to the moon. The rate of innovation is accelerating, and goodness knows, the space race was flooded with national interest and funding. What could we do in 200 years with that kind of dedication and funding? in 400? In half a million?

300,000 years ago, people thought the moon was a god. Going there was not only impossible; it was inconceivable. Today, we think the universe is going to end in 30 billion years. What if we’re wrong? What if, in 30 billion years, we’ve learned how to stop the universe from ending?

What if… just what if… everything we’re doing today isn’t for nothing?

As dour as I’ve been since discovering that not even the universe is going to last forever, there has remained this quiet, nagging voice, this rebuttal that I keep refusing to confront: sure, the universe is going to last a long time and might end, but… I won’t be there for it. Whether the universe survives or not is as much my concern as what I’m going to eat for dinner is the concern of an ant halfway across the planet. It is easy to take things to their illogical conclusion—as a systems engineer, I do it all the time. Yet the point of doing so is to find the limit of idiocy and then back things off until they make sense again. A mile-long power cord for your computer is idiotic. So is a 1-millimeter power cord. Yet, between those obviously stupid extremes, there is a realistic balance to be struck. Somewhere between now and 30 billion years from now, there is a point where the span of seconds, days, and years does have relevance to me. And within that time, I should consider what impact I can make; I should consider what if I don’t throw in the towel. What if I channel that need for purpose into embarking on the most audacious purpose mankind has ever seen?

My whiteboard and journal are both filled with notes, things I want to do if I can get into power. I don’t want to be President (but would be honored to be asked), but I think that with my systems background and the vast amount of reading I’ve been doing to understand how our government works, I can help. More than that, I think I should help. What if I can offer people that sense of purpose they’ve been lacking for the last 40 years? What if, by reaching out to people and setting the direction, I can find that common spirit of goodwill and deep-rooted need for purpose, can channel those towards something that will make not only America, but the whole world, truly awe-inspiring? Forget “great”.

You know, maybe it won’t be me. I’m fine with that. Maybe I’ll inspire someone to go off and do that—someone more charismatic than I am because goodness knows I rolled a nat 1 on that stat. But, I have to think, what if writing this page sets in motion the chain of events that prolongs the life of the universe by another 20 billion years? Our Founding Fathers dared to dream, and I think it’s safe to say that what the US is today would blow their minds. And so, I’m going to dare to dream. What if the increased prosperity worldwide leads to fewer wars and better collaboration? What if the vast resources wasted on mutually assured destruction were turned towards mutually reinforced prosperity and the elimination of famine, climate change, poverty, and homelessness? What if a spirit of mutual respect and goodwill drives us to make things so much better for each other that in just 100 years, we won’t recognize ourselves? What if the 100 years from the 1860s to the 1960s were just a speck of innovation compared to what we as a species are capable of?

What if…?

Welp, 2024 was an eventful year, a year in which I bought a shipping container and had it fitted out to be a lab and writing space separate from the house. A year in which a cat (Kitty) adopted me, and I adopted a dog (Sarge)—though the jury is still out as to whether I will keep the latter.

Work-wise, I started as an engineering manager, and I have pretty fully transitioned back into an electrical engineer. As a result, work has been more rewarding in the last few months. There are rumblings of other changes in the future (for the good), but I won’t speculate on them until they come to pass.

Writing-wise, I did 62 commissions in 2024 (double that of 2023), spanning 444079 words (triple 2023), though I am embarrassed to say that I did not publish a single Jack’s Blacks story. I am excited to say, though, that as Jack’s Blacks and my other stories published on Amazon go, I earned just over $200 in royalties this year. While that isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, I’m delighted to have crushed 2023’s year’s earnings of $60. My total word count is now up to 1,888,786 published words (and some 200k+ of unpublished ones on projects that have been put on hold).

With the dawn of 2025, I am not sure what the future holds. I have been studying a lot of philosophy, having made it through the first two volumes of Plato’s dialogues and having just finished The Republic last night. I do hope to continue studying philosophy and identifying how best to improve myself. My reading list has got to be something on the order of 10,000 pages. I want to find focus, a sense of purpose, a guiding principle similar but superior to the notion of getting a house and land: something against which I can weigh all my decisions. I have missed that sense of purpose.

My dad’s advice is to be a good human and find someone for long-term companionship. I think there is wisdom in his recommendation, though I have struggled for years, trying to figure out where to find people. I am not going to set it as a fixed goal since so much of it is out of my control, but I do want to spend more time working towards it.

Writing-wise, I expect things are going to have to slow down. While last year’s pace did not meet 2018’s, it did consume a huge portion of my time, and other things had to fall by the wayside. So, I am going to leave my queue closed for now until I can get caught up on it. I hope to publish a few Jack’s Blacks this year, and maybe I’ll finally start on Animal Farm. We’ll see. It is possible that with my newfound purpose (once I discover it), writing might drop off precipitously. I’m trying to follow the Tao Te Ching, to stay open-minded to possibilities as they arrive and to prepare to seize them when they do.

To my followers, I wish you all a happy, prosperous, and virtuous 2025.

I went back and reread my latest post on here (good grief, it’s been 4-1/2 months already?), and I realized I’m due for an update.

Where to start? Well, first off, I’m not managing anymore—not officially, anyway. I’m back to designing circuits, and I have really missed it. There are tedious bits—I just completed the schematic review of the most involved design I’ve ever done (by far), and it took a solid two to three weeks to do all the derating analysis, reviewing and approving components, and going page-by-page to make sure everything looks right. But, I have missed it, and it’s so good to be doing it again.

Second, I mentioned it in an earlier post, but I ended up getting the pen, ink, and paper, and I’ve really taken to it. Over a dozen additional inks later, probably a dozen types of papers, and I’ve just ordered my third pen (not to mention four different nibs!), and I’m going strong with it. I don’t write every day like I did when I started, but it is still nice to get everything out on paper, and I’ve found that it’s nice to brainstorm for ongoing commissions that way. Even if it means transcribing my notes into Commission Manager later, there’s something freeing about not being tied to the computer.

Apropos of ongoing commissions, I have two of them now. I’ve gotten the first two installments done for the new commissioner (who seems to have enjoyed them), so that’s been good. It has certainly kept me busy, though. Between that and one-off commissions, I’m staying extremely busy this year. Nowhere near 2018 levels, but still, just about every weekend is spent writing now. I’m gonna need a break soon.

I’ve saved the best for last: I bought myself a finished-out shipping container and turned it into a lab. It’s crazy to me that I haven’t posted about it, but I ordered it at the end of March, had some delays in getting road base delivered, but then got the pad put in and the shipping container delivered in May. Since then, I’ve been spending like a madman, but as of yesterday, it’s finally to where I can really call it a lab. I haven’t ordered the 3D printer or reflow oven, yet—they’re on the list, but I don’t need them right now—but the whiteboard arrived yesterday and is now mounted to the wall, the lab benches are in, the Internet is in, the multimeter and benchtop power supply are sitting happily on their purpose-built shelf, I’ve got ESD mats and a fume extractor for when I solder, and I wrote a tool for managing parts so that I can tell exactly where a particular resistor or photodiode is. I’m also working out of the lab now, so anytime I’m not onsite at the office, I’m out in the lab, surrounded by electronics. I’ve moved the PC out there, too, so that if I want to get away from everything when I write, I have that option. It’s becoming my home away from home… but still at home. In any case, I’m very excited to finally have it ready. Now I just need to figure out which projects I’m going to commit to working on, then take some time off work and writing to actually do it!

Anyway, that’s it for now. I was surprised it had been so long since I posted an update, and now that’s taken care of.

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…

Today, I am taking a mental health day. It’s the first time for me, taking a single day off for mental health and using sick time to do it rather than taking a longer vacation and calling it “mental health” tongue-in-cheek. But, although I have called my vacations “mental health” tongue-in-cheek before, I am taking today seriously and have spent a fair bit of time (the better part of the last 2-1/2 hours) making myself focus on that topic that has eluded me for years (and about which I have spoken on here before): What’s my passion?

Although I had decided on Monday that I needed a day off to recharge (it has been a very stressful few months at work, but I promised myself I wouldn’t think about work today), it was actually a meeting with my financial adviser yesterday that helped me clarify my goal for today. I had come up with a number of “generally good” things to do on a mental health day: stretching, meditating, listening to music, sitting on the front porch, spending time with loved ones, and above all, not thinking about work or commissions (I told you I’m taking this seriously), but I did not have a clear idea of the topic of meditation. But, as I discussed with my finanical adviser, I am in an unusual position for me: my debts are paid off, and my emergency savings will be rebuilt soon, and then—for the first time ever—I will have money coming in that I am not furiously socking away towards achieving financial independence. Don’t get me wrong—I’m ecstatic to finally be in this position—but it’s uncharted territory, and who better to ask about unplanned finances than a financial adviser? He gave me some good advice, and that was: I need to figure out my passion, what it is that’s worth saving for—and perhaps more importantly for someone so deeply entrenched in a saving mindset—something important enough that I’m willing to part with that hard-saved money.

As those who have read my blog before know, this is absolutely not my first time trying to tackle this question. Ever since 2020’s existential crisis on realizing I was not going to have the house I’d spent my adult life working towards, I’ve been wrestling with that question. The trouble is, every time I go to try to address it, I can’t pinpoint anything that is so exciting that I’m willing to puruse it with the fervor that I pursued the house. While circuit design can be fun sometimes, and writing can be fun sometimes, neither one is something I want to chain myself to until the day I die. I truly envy those people who do have such passions. It must be so wonderful to have that clear sense of focus without the distractions of other intersts intruding. And, as I realized today, trying to force myself to commit to a single thing, I inadvertently discovered that my “passion” is to be free to explore my interests as they arise, knowing that none of them is likely to be permanent. To do that—bringing this back to the original point my financial adviser was leading me to—I of course need to have the money to invest in the interest, but perhaps more importantly—given my history of working a lot and saving a lot—I also need to have time I can dedicate.

The good news is that with everything paid off, I hope to have my emergency savings built back up by August (maybe even June if I’m aggressive), and then I won’t need to continue to make the level of income I’m making now. Every time I have taken time off, the thing I have craved most is simply not having to get up and go to work. So, why not quit my day job and live off my savings?

Some interests, say, writing C# code, are essentially free to pursue: I already have a computer, the development environment is free, and all I have to do is start writing code. Writing stories is another such example. While there are tools to streamline the process or help organize thoughts, the fact is that Notepad or TextEdit is perfectly capable of doing the job, and if additional formatting is desired, there are free markdown editors or OpenOffice or Google tools that can be had free of charge.

However, many (I might argue most) interests do require some financial investment. While there is free (or low-cost) PCB design software, it’s not (in my experience) very good. And, even if I can design the board for free, it will still cost money to have it made and still more to put the parts on it and make it functional. Arts and crafts require drawing or painting materials and paper or canvas. Music usually requires an instrument. Astronomy requires a telescope. Rock-climbing requires safety gear and a travel budget. The list goes on. The point is, it would be unwise to quit my day job to have all the time in the world but be unable to afford to actually do anything but sit at home and watch YouTube.

So, there needs to be a balance. The extremes (no work, all play, but no money; or all work, no play, but plenty of money to do it) have not worked and are not likely to work. There is a happy middle in there somewhere, though. I am fortunate in that I’m not starving or barely scraping by—quite the contrary; I am grateful to be in a solid position financially—so I have a combination of time and earning potential to be able to do both. The question is, where do I draw that line?

The answer is, it’s complicated.

It’s complicated because there’s more than just how many hours I work and how much money I make in that time. I mean, it could technically be reduced to that, assuming I could convince my current employer to let me work exactly the number of hours I calculate I want/need to work. That is, however, unlikely, and it’s also overly simplistic because my work with my employer is not my only potential source of income. I can also consider writing part-time; going to work someplace locally, doing something like working retail at the hardware store, grocery store, or gas station; switching to gig work (e.g., designing circuits for hire rather than writing stories for hire); or maybe even finally getting my company off the ground (sheesh, next year will represent 10 years of filing for a company that has made less than $5000 in its entire existence…). Or, maybe a combination of all or some of those.

So, in good engineering / management fashion, let’s try to figure out where the hard limits are and start working from those. Obviously, I have to make enough money to continue to afford my monthly expenses, and the minimum number of hours per month that translates to depends on what type of work I’m doing. I can start off by looking at the minimum hourly rate I would need to make if I continued working full-time (2000 hours per year) but not in my current role. We’ll estimate that at $20 per hour. Based on that, that rules out doing any kind of minimum-wage work because I would have to work more hours than I already am. So, that leaves a part-time engineering job, writing (with caveats), and gig work.

I say writing has caveats because the amount I make depends on how much I charge per word, which in turn affects the availability of work. While my experiment of letting people pick their own price has been a little disappointing (most—but not all—people want to offer less than I was charging before), it has been enlightening in that I’ve seen that 1.25 cents per word seems to be the “sweet spot” for people. But, that means that to meet at least $20 per hour, I’d have to be coming up with 1600 words per hour (and that doesn’t include time spent discussing the project, doing revisions, and don’t even get me started on taxes, insurance, or padding to cover periods where there aren’t a lot of commissions available). In other words, I would be exchanging my current job for full-time (or more than full-time) work writing instead. That is… not what I had in mind when I thought about giving up my day job. If writing were truly my passion and I were more than happy to invest 10 to 16 hours per day doing it, that might be fine. But, as I mentioned, I only want to write some of the time, and that means that I need to be making more. Nevertheless, even if I charged 2 cents per word, it wouldn’t be enough to cover all the “ancillary costs” already mentioned (taxes, unproductive time, etc.), and I would be trading full-time engineering for full-time writing but at much lower income. While I could charge more, say, 5 cents per word, I expect that the number of writing projects would drop off precipitously. So, while writing full-time could be an option, writing part-time is likely not.

That brings me to gig work. An engineer for hire can usually command a higher rate than a writer for hire; however, there are caveats to it. I am already established as a writer with marketing channels I’m already using, and with a portfolio of over 200 stories, I’m a known entity. I would need to get marketing channels set up as an engineer, but I don’t have a whole lot to show on an engineering portfolio since almost all of my work has been at a company. While it’s not impossible to get that up and running, it does represent a higher risk and probably something that I ought to start setting up before leaving stable employment. The costs of commonly used development tools are also a factor since software licenses for, say, Altium, can be on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. And, the “ancillary costs” associated with writing apply here, too. Still, I should be able to command a high enough salary to work part-time and still make ends meet.

Of course, if I’m going to do gig work for someone else, the alternative could be to go to work for myself and get my company off the ground. I did have fun with my business partner when we built our first product, and it might be fun to do something like that again. But, we have been trying off and on for years to come up with a product idea to get behind and have thus far come up empty-handed. While I will probably have to continue working full-time to fund development, this could be a path towards greater wealth if we can get off the ground.

And then, there’s the option of continuing to work at an established company on a part-time basis. The odds of being able to do that at my current company are admittedly low, but it might be an option at a new place.

Let’s not forget, either, that there’s the potential for a combination of these: maybe do writing and engineering gig work as it comes up while poking around at the “next big thing” for my own company? There are a lot of options available, and while financial security remains the most important consideration for me, there is a fair bit of leeway in there to explore. I’m finding myself caught in analysis paralysis.

Frankly, it is not surprising that this is where I find myself now. When I was much younger (circa 4th grade), I was very interested in astrology. Back then, I could tell you when each sign started and what its main characteristics were. While I still remembr the mnemonic (“Ram Bull Twins Crab Liverish. Scaly Scorpions Are Good Water Fish.”), I have to go through it to correlate which sign goes to what month, and aside from a very few, I couldn’t tell you what any of their characteristics are. Two that I can say, though, are Pisces and Aries. That’s because I’m one on the cusp of the other.

Throughout my life, I have felt the tug of both, but the stronger one has oscillated. When I was young, I was extremely Piscean: full of ideas but with absolutely no plan or interest in putting them into action. As I reached adulthood, Aries took over, and I focused squarely on the house, land, and the finances that would get me there. It’s now been almost 20 years under Aries’s influence, and to his credit, he’s gotten me onto land and into a house, and it is all paid off.

But, Aries is tired, and—despite the last 3 years being considerably more comfortable than the 4 spent in the camper—he’s still licking his wounds over not getting the house he wanted. And, Pisces has been growing impatient, having to sacrifice pursuing his passing fancies (and incurring the associated time and expense) so that Aries could follow this singular vision. Aries has run out of things to pursue, and Pisces wants to dabble. So, I think it is time that I assent to the changing of the guard. It is a strange experience to have spent my whole life moving in a direction and then running out of directions to move. But, hopefully in Pisces’s dabbling, Aries will find something new to pursue, and then we’ll charge off in that direction.

Regardless of what happens then, though, I need to focus on what comes next. My immediate goal is getting the savings fund saved up, but after that, I’m going to start having options open up, and I want to be prepared to make that choice when it arises.

Further confounding all of this is the complacency versus contentment discussion I keep having with myself. The barn is the prime example. It is not “nice”, and parts of it (the ones the animals cannot access) are not very safe. But, although it clearly shows its age, it’s still standing and affords shelter from the wind (albeit noisily) and rain (with a few leaks here and there, but there are plenty dry areas where the animals can get out of the rain). It is pretty well impossible to heat when it’s cold, but a deicer in each water trough works plenty fine to keep them from freezing. The animals don’t “like” it in there (unless there’s food, they don’t spend much more time in there than they have to), but they will go in there to eat or to get out of the sun. While I would like a nicer-looking barn with proper insulation, lighting, etc., I don’t think it’s worth it to spend that kind of money just for those things. And, because it’s not what I want it to be, I am also loath to spend money to make it look nicer or to reinforce the interior walls that aren’t currently serving any purpose. While I could spend the money to run electricity to the front of the barn (the non-animal side), the outlets I already have (with cords run to the front from the back but out of reach of the animals) have done well enough. It begs the question: am I lazy, or am I content to abide as it is? The accusing part of me tells me I’m just being lazy and that for not that much money, I could run another few circuits to the front of the barn for proper lighting and other things, but the other part of me queries why to spend any money (or get up on ladders—something I absolutely hate doing) if what I have is getting me by? Much of what I want falls into the same category: while I would like a proper, larger house (that isn’t a trailer house and that is more than 400 square feet), what I have is paid for and is doing “well enough” for me. Given this place cost $40k, is it worth another $40k to double the space? That tradeoff is one I’ve been having trouble making lately.

Then there are the things I “ought” to do but don’t feel particularly motivated to do. For instance, my dad has been telling me for years that I need to put up some shelter for the tractor and trailers. And, he’s right: leaving them out in the sun does make them break down faster than if they were shaded. But, the fact is that they’ve spent the last 7+ years under the sun already; would sheltering them now provide much benefit? And, in terms of cost, how much savings in reduced wear can I get, and how long will it take to amortize the cost of the structure in the first place? Given I just paid everything off last month, how long will it take to save up to buy the structure, or how long will it take to pay it off? And, what’s the worst that can happen if I don’t produce that shelter? I might have to replace the tractor sooner or perform additional maintenance on it that I wouldn’t have had to do if I’d kept it covered. But, I had planned to replace the tractor at some point with something bigger anyway. One could argue that I will get less for it if I sell it in poor condition than if I sell it in good condition, but again, it’s already been exposed for 7+ years. It seems unlikely to me that it continuing to maintain the status quo will have additional negative impact. Maybe I’m just not being creative enough in thinking through bad outcomes. Regardless, though, whether I should do it or not, I’m probably not going to until something compels me to think otherwise.

So, while I had hoped that the result of this entry would be a clear direction of, “oh, this is the thing I’m excited to pursue”, I find myself left with more questions. Perhaps a subsequent entry will address it further. At least, I do have the notion that working less and spending more time and money on things I’m interested in doing would be a good thing to strive for. And, putting money into a “hobby bucket” that might later be repurposed for barns or tractor sheds might not be a bad idea, either.