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November 15, 2005
For Consideration
Where I work and what I do is interesting. Today I came back from an out of the office company meeting in which everyone presents to everyone else all the work that they are doing, and we get a picture of how this office fits into the network globally. The highlight was John Jay’s presentation on our new Shanghai office, and a small fraction of the enourmous presentation that was done to Nike China there just a few days earlier.
Where I work and what I do is exhausting, alternatively rewarding, immensely challenging and sometimes just ridiculous. I never imagined working in such an insane way while in school, or anywhere else for that matter, and I always considered myself someone who works quite hard. With anything one pours that ammount of effort into, the questions inevitably come up: Is it worth it? and Why?
Today was no exception, and I’d say a decent amount of time I spend at work (or even away from it) is in a strange dazed state; an induced outward malaise that neccessarily has to be maintained in order to inwardly focus on projects at hand and accomplish things that need to be done by certain times. Therefore it can be surprising and unnerving to be approached by people from the outside world, as they have no insight into what’s going on inside your brain, and they don’t know that your social interaction is operating at some basic motor-skill level just to get you by.
Shouldn’t I be a machine? For this kind of existance, wouldn’t it be entirely more efficient and plausible to exist only as a cloud of thought, a collection of information and idea-crunching intelligence processes that are directly wired into the Adobe, Apple, and Macromedia suite of software programs?
Actually, I used Ben Fry’s Valence as an internal reference to some online ideas.
This is not healthy. This is not a state of mind conductive to robust friendships–this is a place that turns me more and more inward, in need of large amounts of personal recovery time for reflection and re-evaluation. And a frightening dynamic which has begun to arise in my head is the categorization of the whole of humanity into two distinct groups: agency-people, and non-agency-people. Subjectively I’d like to spend all my free time with non-agency-people, especially with people who are creative, but non-agency, to stay connected to the normal human world, and perhaps more signifcantly, to creativity existing for a purpose other than funneling into advertisment.
In practice however, this is much harder than it seems, as being an agency-person, you much consciously attempt to maintain a seperate non-agency self that can still connect to the outside world in an ordinary way, but more often than not, this self is consumed or buried too deeply to come out with immediacy. And furthermore, though I’ve heard of the significance of the support of friends and significant others, this is certainly not a mindstate in which obtaining a girlfriend is something in the realm of possibility. And even if it was, how do you connect to said non-agency person in a simple way that belies all the neouroses (for me anyway) that your existence entails?
At the moment it is worth it, though I still maintain that it’s a huge sacrifice: I am putting off a multitude of personal projects in order to do my job and that pains me every day. But what I am afraid of is sticking with it too hard and too long to come back. I am actually frightened of becoming more important, more promoted, more entrenched in what I do. Maybe I’m not sure if I really want to do it, and if I believe in it, though I think it will become harder and harder to walk away from with time. Whatever the case, I’m on our side for now.
Posted by shane at November 15, 2005 01:29 AM