Melancholia

I don’t know what has brought on the recent funk in my life, and I was determined to find out.

It might be because I was recently turned down for a promotion. It might be because I came back from a 3-week-trip in Europe to the same old familiar, and a province now run by conspiracy theorists. It might be cause I am searching for anything that I want to spend hours on, like arts, swimming, and skill, and I have found nothing. It might be because this restlessness is only met with more loneliness and I’m afraid it will do to me.

I mean in the sense of classic Ikigai, I had it pretty good. I have a decent job that I used to think I was decent at and it will help others and humanity that I quite like. But lately, I’ve been asking “Do I really love it? Do I really love software engineering?” Or is it because I’m decently good at it and because without software, I literally have no other marketable and transferrable skills? And it does do good for the world and others? I look at the world with the tech billionaires, with Elon now owning Twitter and with Mark ruining the Metaverse, I couldn’t help but wonder, “How much of this tech world and software world can I influence and change?” 

I was searching deep down in my soul for the thing that “I’m passionate about”, the thing I can spend hours on, the thing I keep polishing my skills at. If the garden this year is any indication, I can spend 3-4 years learning a new skill that I absolutely sucked at. If my painting is any indication, I can spend days and days, 6-10 hours each day working on one thing and completing it. If my Lego is any indication, I get obsessed and I go at it like a dog with a bone until I’m finished. If my first novel is any indication, I can create something, spending half hour a day on lunch break for 2 years to complete it. I am capable of that one thing you are “passionate about”. I just am having a really hard time finding it.

It’s Halloween and seeing all the people on social media going to party with costumes, I thought to myself, I have no energy for that anymore. I used to spend days making some obscure references into a costume. In a poorly adapted metaphor, I’m a vehicle in need of both the compass and the fuel. I always coach my team members about direction and autonomy. Instead, here I am, stagnating, alone, sitting in place slowly sinking into an ice lake filled with political uncertainty and human isolation.

I miss the time when the direction was simple. Get out of Vietnam. Get a scholarship. Graduate. Get a job. Go somewhere I can be authentic. Get married. Build a family. Be a CTO of a tech scale-up.

This funk feels like an empty void, one that is slowly swallowing up everything, not fast enough to be noticed, but present enough to be torturous. 

After all, as I read somewhere, black holes should be the most terrifying costume about Halloween.