The whole process of becoming an astronaut helped me understand that what really matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how I personally feel while performing it. ... If I'd defined success very narrowly, limiting it to peak, high-visibility experiences, I would have felt very unsuccessful and unhappy during those years. Life is just a lot better if you feel you're having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so.I spent today reading this book, quite unintentionally actually. It was a book that was mentioned in this Reddit comment to the original one about a prank in Skylab.
It was an unexpectedly good read. Sorry, OpenStax College: Organisational Behaviour, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is just more compelling to read.
This isn't a book review post, so I'm just going to say that what Hadfield had written was inspirational, and that particular quote that I cited in the beginning of this post has given me a little more insight on the type of path that I am heading forwards, not so much as being an astronaut (I'm too old and born in the wrong damn place for that), but the type of attitude that I could have that would make whatever is remaining of my current life just that little bit more worthy of living.
Looking back, I think I did experience the type of thing that he was referring to specifically in that quote (and more thematically throughout his memoir). I remembered that the happiest that I had felt was not when folks were applauding me when I successfully executed a difficult [for the time and skill level at that time] performance of 笛子 in concert, but when I had figured something out on my own. These moments were like the times when I figured out how certain paper craft combinations worked when I was in primary school, the many little programming experiments that I was doing (simple games, a pseudo-random number generator based cryptographic tool, a full-featured reverse polish notation math tool complete with numerical integration/differentiation and graphing capabilities, base-10 big ``integer'' mathematics support using strings, all in QBasic) in secondary school, competitive programming related algorithms and steganographic concepts in junior college, and computer science-y odds and ends in undergraduate times.
But after that, it seemed that I somehow ``lost'' all these fun little things where I figure stuff out. There is a light revival as I start to figure out flute-y things while figuring out what professional-level concert flute to get, and the systematisation of 笛子 techniques in English, but they are definitely less fulfilling in comparison only because they are starting to fall in the ``a win every 10 years'' category.
Actually, part of why I absolutely loved working the research institute was that I had many opportunities for small wins that would add up over time. Figuring out how to build the back-end mechanisms to support data management was an interesting exercise of maintaining some manner of portability while being performant, and keeping scalability and security in the background. It stretched me in ways that were pleasant, and I would happily just think, design, and then program for hours at a time. But of course, manglement started getting in the way, with all kinds of policies that made it neigh impossible to tinker---there was a strong wrong-headed approach towards standardisation and centralisation of all personal-level computing. Mind you, we were working on infocomm technology, where our laboratory was literally the workstation that we worked on, and our tools were various software that we had to write and/or install. Something as mundane as spinning up a virtual machine to test a service-based architecture would be prohibitively laced with red-tape to make the cost of testing not worth it.
That was one of the reasons why I left, incidentally. The manglement's obsessive need of control without a good understanding of what it was we were doing made the policies that were created anti-thetical to stay---because they were, put bluntly, making it impossible for me to actually do the work that I was hired to do. Sadly, they were also damn proud of it too, which makes it all the sadder.
Actually, that is also the same reason why I left the last company I worked at too. I'm sick of being some warm body to fill up a spot so that manglement can give itself the self-pat on the back for ``following the best practices in the `industry' '' without necessary knowing what the industry is.
In the terminology of Hadfield, I was prevented from even being a ``zero''. Hadfield classifies the neutral contributor as a ``zero''---the person does not contribute detrimentally to the cause (a ``minus one'') nor is the person a super-star (a ``plus one''). Being a ``zero'' is literally the bare minimum that one should strive to be in a team, and in those places, I was actively prevented from doing so thanks to various managerial behaviours.
And this is also why I needed a sabbatical. To seek joy again in a life that has been ripped to shreds with the multi-whammy of a bad break-up, active hampering of doing what I was trained to/could do, and generally bad prospects for the future in general.
God is in control, but I still need to exercise my free will. But I cannot exercise my free will if I am not in the right state of mind either. Reading His word is one way to gain joy, but unfortunately I'm still stuck with this puny mortal body, and so I need to take some care of it as well---it is probably good for me if I just get called home to the Lord now, but it won't do His plan nor anyone else any favours.
So I just need to grit my teeth, grin, and try to seek the joy and beauty that is in this world to give myself a good enough reason to go on.
I wasn't expecting this blog entry to be this long, but here it is anyway. Till the next update, I suppose.
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