Here goes nothing

When you’re a kid, the generic question that most adults will ask you is “what do you want to do when you grow up?”  This question always baffled me.  I had no idea, and I still don’t.  The life plan was: go to school, get good grades, go to university, get a job, get married, have kids.  That’s what you do.  Ignoring the larger problems with this kind of pre-planned life, adults seemed to want to get me to fixate on the “get a job” part of that plan.  What kind of job would you get? What are you going to be?  What will you make of yourself?

Ugh.

For a large part of the population, work is something you do to pay the bills and make it so that you can do the things you want to do.  There are, of course, people whose employment either fulfils them or suits some need or aptitude that they have, and they are the lucky few.  But no kid ever says “I want to be a Mortgage Broker when I grow up!”  

So I went to school to study Literature, because it was what I loved.  I learned to read critically, and write essays, and by the time I finished, that love was ground to a fine powder under the weight of 3500 pages a semester.  I ended up not reading another novel for over a decade.  After graduation, I got a job in the games industry because it was what I loved.  I worked on some of the worst and best games I’ve ever played and by the time I was “laid off,” it was years before I could play anything without mentally logging bugs and design issues.

The rest of my employment history isn’t important.  I waited tables for years, and was good at it, I worked for a bank and was good at that, too.  But I wanted to do those two things that I used to love, write and play games.  

So let's try that for a while.