# Dream career
In one of my entries from yesterday I was talking about how I wasn't really all
that interested in doing any sort of EE work in aerospace because I didn't
really see the point. (Except also I was in a super-excited mood to just kinda
dump everything out so maybe that wasn't too coherent. IDK. Brain stuff is
weird.)
So what kind of career *would* I want? I guess a better place to start would
be to step back a little bit and ask what I want out of a career. Because if
I'm going to be doing something for a significant chunk of my life, it damn
better well be something I want to do.
Right now I'm an electrical engineer, specializing in embedded systems. That's
what my resume says, anyways, because it's the closest to the professional
experience I have and the general sorta stuff I'm interested in. I mean *heck*,
summer of 2018 I was working on a Game Boy game. For fun! And I did a whole
lotta embedded programming with that space satellite project.
But as I mentioned in the last entry, *emotions* have rather suddenly become a
VITAL part in how I see and experience the world. A big part of the reason why I
went down the EE path *at all* was because I was super duper into old computers
when I was younger. Growing up I didn't really have much besides video games and
my old 1999 HP computer to keep me entertained. Trying to hang out with someone
felt nigh-on-impossible to coordinate, I didn't have a lot of friends in school
(turns out emotional connections are important for friendships, who would've
thunk?) and my parents didn't really have the money for me to chase down
hobbies. But I could always play some Mario on the DS, and I could always turn
on the computer and fiddle with Microsoft Frontpage or The Games Factory or
Windows Movie Maker or whatever.
So, naturally, I just kept going further and further down that rabbithole. I
didn't want to just use my computer to write Mario fanfiction, I wanted to know
how it *ticked*, how to make my *own* Mario games. And my dad had a bunch of
computer programming books lying around the house because of his job, so I
just *devoured* those and never really stopped tinkering.
It was the Sonic hacking scene that *really* got me interested in going even
deeper. Making my own Sonic game running on old hardware was something that I
was really interested in, never mind the fact that I never owned a Mega Drive
growing up. (had a SNES though, that was fun.) So I downloaded the disasm and
the tools and fiddled about for a bit and never really got anywhere but still
had the deep down appreciation. And then the whole Sonic R thing happened (I
wrote an article about it, not gonna rehash) and while I'm not *against* diving
back into ROM hacking, I'm realizing there's probably much better uses of my
time. At the very least I could be throwing that effort into an original IP
like the devs of Freedom Planet and Spark the Electric Jester did.
Going back to the original topic of careers... the only reason I went down the
EE path was because that's what I knew, and that's what I was interested in. I
wanted to make a very good Sonic game as a kid, and here we are, I'm 4 years
into a degree with at least 1 or 2 left to go because the college transfer ate
some of my credit hours and I'm starting to flounder in classes because of a
combination of burnout and ADHD and blegh. I don't hate programming and I don't
hate computers and I don't hate electronics. They're all very neat, and I'm glad
I learned what I did about them. But *for the rest of my life*? Really?
At this point I'm so far in the hole in student loan debt that switching degrees
now would be a very, VERY silly idea. And in fairness I do genuinely enjoy this
sorta stuff. Solving problems, refactoring things, optimizing, planning. All
very enjoyable. But there's no getting around the *outcomes* and the *ethics*
of what I'm doing.
If I wanted to go into aerospace, I'd be signing up to work for a defense
contractor. And I dunno, I'm not particularly fond of the status quo, and I
really don't think I want to devote my time and energy to helping make bombs
and missiles and fighter planes to enforce the authority of capitalism and
American influence on the world. (oh hey, that must be the sound of my
background check failing.)
So, assuming that I HAVE to be an electrical engineer, what can I do that will
actually do GOOD things for humanity? ...what is good, actually? Briefly,
- Helps more people than it hurts
- Doesn't contribute to generating waste without SERIOUS societal benefit
- Promotes decentralization and takes control away from large tech conglometates
- Respects user's privacy and choices
- Is customizable, hackable, repairable
I suppose one field I'd really love to work in would be public transit. Go make
some automated subway trains or something. I like public transit, a lot, because
it allows for MORE people to do MORE things without having to take on the burden
of car ownership, gasoline purchases, learning how to drive, car repair, etc.
If public transit was better and you could just get on a bus or a train here and
get off there and that was just how life worked, I think the world would be a
better place. Granted any conversation about public transit would be incomplete
without talking about how silly suburbs are and how everyone's in a strict
competitive arms race against their neighbors because the current system
demonizes sharing land and assets with them but I digress.
Another field would be... yeah actually this is a hard question. Something
farming-related? But also we got John Deer and their proprietary tractor DRM,
plus I don't *particularly* have an interest in farms, so IDK. Water treatment?
Infrastructure stuff? The problem with that is the same problem with the radio
and the television and the internet, some big corporation will thank you for
your work and then just sorta take it over and flood it with advertising and
profit-squeezing and I'm not for that.
If I were to reroll I might just become like a physicist or a librarian or
something. I like research. I like learning new things, trying options out,
and esp. with the librarian thing, helping other people. But alas, it's too
late for that now. I'm stuck chasing a $80K/yr job I don't even want and, let's
be honest, I'm not sure if I can even get at this point.
gemini://park-city.club:1965/~invis/phlog/005-dream-career.txt