Notes on Uncertainty and Letting Go

To my dad, who is prone to believing in the end of the world. Everything is going to be just fine, even if it isn't.

The Modern World

SO APPARENTLY, the future might suck. We could have a global depression. We could have wars, there could be terrorists, people could be poor. Your neighbor could burn your house down. Your dog might die. There might be hurricanes or blizzards, or maybe even meteors, the earth might be heatin' up. You could break your leg. Or both. Someday, if you're lucky, you might just end up dead.

So what.

Modern society could be criticized in a lot of different ways, but in my view the biggest problem it's created is the expectation that life should be comfy, cozy and secure. You'll get your welfare check and your white picket fence and 2.4 cars and then you'll get your pensions and your medications and drugs so that you never feel any pain. That's the default. That's the expectation. And it's a problem.

The problem is not that it's impossible. In fact, we've almost done it. Up until recently, if you lived in America or Europe, or you happen to have a few bankrolls lying around, that's the life you got. The problem is that a comfy cozy life sounds so good on paper but ends up being so weak in the end.

Why are the richest countries the ones with the most depression, unhappiness, suicide, and negativity? The more money you have, the more problems you can simply buy off instead of having to deal with. And dealing with problems is as fundamental to life as joy and happiness. Modern society has tried to skim the cream off of life, taking just the positive and eliminating the negative. People forget that you can't have one without the other. The fairy tale doesn't work when there is peace and no enemies and the princess just walks up to the bored knight and snaps her fingers. Dissatisfaction and anxiety fill the hole where no other problems exist.

Viewpoints and Expectations

Turn on the TV and watch the news with me for a bit. Let's see - over the weekend, we had a grandma get murdered, a three car crash on the highway, third quarter financials came out, some new fears have the debt market spooked, something about Iran or Estonia happened, and Congress stuck a thumb up its ass. Now let's get a typical reaction to each of these stories. Granny - 'Oh my gosh, that's terrible, how could somebody do something like that? That makes me so mad.' Car crash - 'Oh that's so sad. Just awful.' Haywire in the markets - 'Oh boy I hope I don't lose my job.' Iran - 'Oh that's so scary! Sheesh why do they have to do that?' Congress - 'Oh they make me so mad. How could they be so dumb?'

Those are all legitimate reactions. A car crash is pretty sad. Losing your job would suck. The world is a scary place. But when you expect these things not to happen, you're set up for disappointment every time. Millions of miles are driven every single day, so crashes are inevitable. Billions of dollars flow around the economy, so layoffs and downturns will happen. Get used to it.

It can also be very difficult to take yourself out of your own shoes. Call a terrorist or a murderer inhuman if you will, but they are just as human as you are, and you'd be shocked at the things every single one of us is capable of in different circumstances. Call Congress a bunch of babies, but you would do the same things if you were there. The structure is set up to reward that behavior, with party lines and lobbyists and government funding and corporate influences. Call Ahmedinejad what you will, but he's not crazy.

You can rest assured that these things will continue in the future. There will always be a million and one things to be scared of and things to be pissed off about, even if the names and faces change.

Living

These things will sometimes affect your life. And there's nothing you can do about it. But can change how you react to it, and that makes all the difference.

If you realize that bad things will happen, if you allow them to happen without diving headfirst into denial or anger or sadness or all three, then you can start to really appreciate the other side of the coin and all the good things life has to offer.

If you got laid off and kicked out of the country and were living poor, would you spend your time being angry and sad or would you enjoy life? There are a whole lot of very poor people who are very happy and content. You can still have friends and family, you can laugh, you can live. If a family member dies, would you spend years in denial and bitterness at the unfairness of life, or would you celebrate their life, mourn the loss and move on? If you die tomorrow, how are you going to react to that?

Basically, if you know the difference between what you can control and what you can't, if you know that people are human and everybody's circumstances are different, and if you can stop from clinging on to expectations and what you have, then life can really improve. It's something I definitely need to work on, but those are my thoughts for today.

Searching for the Soul of Mechanical Engineering

A little over a year ago I switched into ME from Materials Science. I have since insulted myself quite a few times for making that decision.

What is it with mechanical engineering? Isn't it pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when people think about engineering? How does it manage to look so attractive from the outside yet so uninspired and bland from the inside? Basically, you choose mechanical if you aren't cool enough to do anything else. Want to do research? Go MSE or nuclear. Want to do cutting-edge design? Do aero. Start a company? Choose EECS. Run a company? IOE is for you. Save lives? Biomed. Don't have a clue? Mechanical.

ME occupies the vast, lonely space in between everything else. MEs specialize at nothing and share no common dream. It's the beta version, the default setting, the neutral territory. Yet, the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that being exceptionally bland, tedious, unfocused and all around non-sexy might be the real strength of the field.

Depending on who you listen to, there are two basic ways to use education to become rich and successful and do great things. The first way is to find a niche that is valuable and focus solely on that niche until you are one of the best in the world. The second way is to do absolutely the opposite and just learn a bit of everything. If both ways can work, it would seem that just having a plan laid out to use your education strategically is the real differentiator, but that's for a different post. In any case, while most engineering focuses on method 1, ME is the only one definitively planted in method 2.

There is a certain amount of risk in both methods, but the risks are very different. If you choose one focus, you risk two things: first, that you just don't have the skills to become an expert, and second, that you will eventually lose your drive or interest in that niche. If instead you focus on nothing, you risk that you won't have built up enough skills to do anything well at all. The thing is, the world needs both types of people. In order for a project to go well, you need big-picture organizers that can speak everybody's language and relate to all of them, as well as the specialists on the edges who bring the heavy skills.

For where I am at right now, route 2 is clearly the better option. With EGL, I already chose a diversified education over a focused one, and I never doubt joining that club. I'm also quite vulnerable to the risk of losing interest if I pick a niche (see my last post). And, in general I think big-picture people have more freedom to choose what they want to work on at any given time, allowing for more creative and diverse work (things I definitely value). If the price of that is flat, dry, grind-it-out with your bare knuckles coursework in the meantime, so be it. All those fools who chose interesting fields will be working for us someday.

Undefined

I ranted earlier in this blog about my frustrations with the 'follow your passion' advice. I believed that it created inaction because a lot of people haven't clearly defined their passion, and that uncertainty halts them in their tracks. I still think that is the biggest problem with the advice, but after talking to some people and thinking about it for some time, I'm going to add one more important one that is interesting to explore further - the problem of definition. Let me explain.

I attended my first career fair earlier this fall. I had (what I thought was) a solid resume, a nicely rehearsed pitch, and a black felt fedora with a perky blue feather. What I didn't have, as I explained in my earlier post, was a good answer to the inevitable question 'so what do you want to work on?' I usually answered with something broad like, energy. That question, I believe, is why I still haven't gotten a single response to all my follow-ups and applications. I realize that I probably should have just picked something specific for each company, but it didn't feel honest. Why? Basically, it's because I didn't want to limit myself.

Any time you have to make a choice, science shows, it generates stress. More choices actually make people less happy, and it's because every choice involves loss in the form of opportunity cost. Sometimes that cost is very small, like when the decision is insignificant or the choices not made are worthless. But in the case of 'what is your passion', making one single choice means saying no to an incredible array of very good options. Obviously nobody is asking you to make that one choice and stick with it forever, but even making it once often involves a lot of opportunity cost. If I had gone to the career fair looking for an internship in, say, the design of automotive brake pads, maybe I would have found it. But it would have shut down countless other opportunities for internships that I would have enjoyed.

The fact that creating a definition or making a choice involves loss applies to a lot of different aspects of life. For example, I was asked in Topics in Leadership class today to come up with a personal purpose statement. Take a second and complete the sentence: 'My purpose in life is _____.' Anything more specific than 'do good things and lead a good life' is inevitably going to be incomplete at best. You can see the problems with this exercise right on the surface - you are limiting through definition your very purpose in life. Does that really sound like a logical or sensible thing to do?

There is a good commercial running right now in which somebody asks a new acquaintance at a tailgate party, 'so what do you do?' The scene flips rapidly through the main character going fishing, playing frisbee with his kid, pounding in nails, climbing a mountain, etc. The guy replies 'Well, I... um, yeah.' Not surprisingly, he finds it impossible to package his life into a neat little boxed up reply.

In many ways this is an application of the Buddhist philosophy that any attempts to define or conceptualize reality ultimately fail. It is impossible to define boundaries around an object or concept and capture the whole picture. A better attempt, although still imperfect, is to use the negative tense. For example, my friend Erik suggested that the best advice you could give regarding passion would be stated 'dont pursue anything you aren't passionate about'. Doesn't have the same ring to it, but doesn't it give off a much more liberating feeling than the positive advice?

I'm going to make a decision here and deliberately not have answers to 'what is your passion' or 'what is your purpose' or anything like that. It feels good to not have to have an answer. But then again, maybe I'm just being picky or stubborn. After all, at some point I'm going to need to just get an internship already.