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No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction at anytime.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction,
a blessed unrest keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others.
-- Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille
Was || Will Be || Past Moments || Now || Notes

2001-09-20 - 11:24 a.m.

wherein our plucky your hero questions his place in the universe, and longs to contribute. anything.

so last night i was hunting around on the web, looking for a new job, and things are looking pretty thin around here right now. and i was reflecting on what i've accomplished in the last four years of my career.

you ready?

here it comes.

very, very little.

you see, at this job we have a product, that i've worked on and contributed to, and it's officially released. it's out there in the market. it's for sale. how many paying customers have installed and run it? less than five.

at my last job, i worked for ten months, and a week before our first product was going to ship, we went out of business.

at the job before that, i worked for six months on a site that never launched.

at the job before that, i worked on several web sites that *did* actually deploy. and many more that did not.

and so in the past four years, the vast majority of my time has been spent on building things that basically went nowhere. and while in some ways it is amusing to be paid ridiculous sums of money for doing effectively nothing.

in many other, more important ways.

it's not so much funny as really.

really.

depressing.

and so i want like hell to find a job that will make some kind of difference.

because even the things i've worked on that didn't vanish into the digital ether, well their purpose could reasonably be described as greasing the wheels of big business.

and that doesn't really make me feel like i'm.

oh i don't know.

contributing anything.

and TwinSis hung her PhD on the wall and went to teach high school physics in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in our fair city.

and i'm wondering if maybe i couldn't find a job with the red cross or amnesty international or do something resembling anything worthwhile.

ten, twelve years ago i was going to save the world. by myself if need be.

now i'm working everyday at building next to nothing so i can fill my nest with more bright, shiny, electronic objects.

and i want my life to be more than that.

i want my life to *mean* more than that.

i want my having lived to not just make some kind of difference, but for it to be a positive force in the world.

i want the world to be better for my having been in it.

and right now i'm not feeling much like that's the case.

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