Every once in a while, I get this general feeling of dissatisfaction, that I’m in the wrong industry for employment, and I really wanna get out and change things around. Usually, I kinda shrug it off and indifferently will just try to distract myself more in an attempt to placate the boredom. Recently, though, over the past few months, the feeling has been building a bit, and becoming not just harder to ignore, but is making a lot more sense.
The truth is, I never wanted to go into computers as a job. It just kind of happened, because at the time I needed a job, it was one of the skills I had. I’ve actually done a lot of other jobs growing up, most of them low-paying “dead-end” jobs which I actually enjoyed a lot. If I could afford the lifestyle, I’d go back to them in a heartbeat. But getting into computer programming as a full-time career was definitely never the plan of mine. However, at the same time, I never really knew what I wanted to do either.
Well, I’m sure about one thing now … after doing this for almost ten years, I don’t wanna do this.
That doesn’t come as any real surprise … I knew that all along. What I find interesting though, is how, when I was thinking about it recently I came to some interesting realizations. It helps to describe for me in terms of contrast to what I really wanna study, which is psychology (and / or sociology).
Computer technology for me, is interesting, but it never really gets past the stage of curiosity or novelty. I really enjoy reading stuff on a huge variety of subjects — from high level stuff like device sales to low level stuff like assembly programming. It’s all interesting, but in the end, not really life-changing or fascinating enough to get me to do something about it. It’s just a distraction. Psychology, though, I can’t get enough of it when I read about it. Everything about it — covering lots of subjects, my favorites being personality and development psychology — not only fascinates me, but gets me thinking about it all the time. I love turning over the ideas in my head and considering it more and more.
The other major thing I noticed is that when I have free time, it’s rarely spent doing stuff with computers, in the sense of learning more. However, I do a lot of light reading, and it’s almost always about theological stuff, but even then, my interests drift towards the practical applications (the sciences, if you will) of how religious influences can affect someone’s life. The causes and effects of moral living on attributes, habits, personality, traits, lifestyle, etc. Those totally fascinate me.
So, I’m gonna try and go back to school again this fall. I’m hoping to get on track a bit, and shake things up. I’d love to get out of computers, and do something I feel much more passionate about. 🙂