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dogshavelegs · 4 years ago

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Digging a hole for Zihuatanejo

Disclaimer - this was written over the Christmas break but not posted at the time. Oddly I kind of like the day job right now, probably because I decided against trying to climb the career ladder and concentrated on doing the things I do the way I want to do them, but I'm posting it anyway, even if it doesn't represent where I'm at, three and a bit weeks into a new year.

During the first few years of my adult life I lived in a flat with a bunch of fellas from various parts of the UK and we sat around most afternoons, evenings and nights smoking hash and watching films on vhs. We probably owned (and when I saw we I don’t mean me - I owned zero vhs’s, and also didn’t pay rent (even when I was meant to) or buy hash due to the fact that unlike my friends I did not receive an allowance from my parents allowing me to do such things without figuring out how to budget my grant cheques over the term, which was *not* going to happen) thirty or fourty vhs films, mainly 90s staples such as Trainspotting and Braveheart (we were in Scotland, afterall) mixed in with recent classics such as Platoon and Scarface. We watched a few of these films several times a week, but the most popular film of all was The Shawshank Redemption. Each of us loved it, we quoted it constantly and new each beat by heart, but few of us realised then how we were watching a metaphor for how our lives would pan out. Each of us would end up interned in our own little Shawshank, and each of us would need to dig a hole for Zihuatenejo, in one way or another.

For me, my Shawshank has become the career I’ve built for myself. I think I kept doing the things I’ve always been doing, and the world changed under me. Once I understood what I was meant to be doing - I was meant to be making things with computers for a living, but now I don’t do that. I manage teams that do that, but even then so much of our time seems to be taken up with things that exist next to making things with computers, or just making bits of the things. Someone else designs them (that would be UX), someone else does a bit of maths that seems for the most part irrelevant to what we’re trying to achieve (that would be data science), someone else keeps these things running in production (that would be one of the few cloud providers we get to chose from, with a bit of help from sys admins, or devops, or SRE, or whatever new name they want to pick next) and we’re left in the middle. Even the middle is divided into two ends that we are obliged to choose from - front or back. Why doesn’t everyone get it - there is no stack.

Once it seemed the things we made took a stand. Every new website made a bold play as to what would look cool. Every app tried to define the world around it. But now we all occupy the middle. All the fonts and colours are the same. We log in the same way, and we expect everything to be the same when we get there. But it’s all boring. The web is hemongenised. Where are the rough corners? Where is the personality? Why can’t we just create something? Why can’t we make a decision without asking “users” opinions first. I started doing this because I could do things quickly and show them to the world without fuss or fanfare. It was punk. Everything now is over-produced pop, made by a cast of thousands. There is no room for an individual to create anything. There’s always an opposing opinion we have to satisfy. Nobody ends up happy. We’re all just slightly unhappy instead.

Art is doing the thing you do the way you want to do it, no matter what everyone else thinks. If people happen to agree with you - great, you have a success. If not, keep doing it your way anyway. If you don’t do it your way you may as well let someone else do it.

So what does this all have to do with Shawshank? I guess I don’t know. I guess I’ve found myself in Shawshank, and I need to dig a hole somewhere and get out. I guess I need to figure out what Zihuatanejo is for me, and start digging a hole towards it.

I know what Zihuatanejo isn’t for me. It isn’t continuing on this track. It isn’t ambition. I don’t want that next step on the career ladder, or the step after that, because the day-to-day activities involved with those next steps don’t make me happy. I’m good at them - I’m an awkward bastard and I give few enough shits about what people think to be able to “get things done” and “step on a few toes”, and I have the experience to back it up - none of these things are my ideas, they are just the same old rope trotted out for a new audience. Well we can’t tour the classics forever, we’ll need a new album at some point or other.

It seems the older I get the more life typecasts me in roles suitable to my age and experience - as a manager, or a leader, or a father of a couple of rowdy boys. Well that’s not a role I enjoy playing. I want to create again, I want to have fun and make art. I want to do it my way, even if the world looks the other way.

So I guess that’s it then. Decision made. I can do the day job for a while longer. I can put up with the guards and the other inmates. I can swim through a river of shit if I need to. But I’m digging a hole to Zihuatanejo, cause when it comes down to it we all need to make a choice - get busy living, or get busy dying.

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