I’ve turned 27 this month, yay 🥳🥳
It’s an eventful year for me, I’ve finally got a job in tech, I’m working on a challenging project, learning & growing each day, I’m a part of an amazing team and everything seems to be on the right track!
Well, everything but one. I’m not happy.
“ Living…… Means having bonds with others. Paying attention to someone. Loving someone. Hating someone. Having fun being with someone. Taking someone’s hand. That’s what it means to live. If you’re all alone, you can’t tell that you exist. Your relationship with others, is what defines being alive. I know my mind exists, since I can interact with others. I know my body exists, because others touch me. That’s where the purpose of being alive comes from. Just like we’ve been chosen to live out this moment here and now.”
In the past years, I’ve always put my professional life first, I’ve put everything on hold for the sake of it, even after I got into tech, my first action was to add a goal for the next year “Get Promoted To a Mid-level Developer”. This mindset ended up affecting my social life (which wasn’t great, to begin with), my motivation for work, and will soon catch up to affect my health.
While there’s nothing wrong with having career goals, it doesn’t mean putting everything in your life aside. Life is short and our time is limited, work is only one sector, it shouldn’t be what define us!
You’d think that this focused mindset would lead up to more success in school and a more successful career but, it did the opposite with me. When you put all your energy into one thing alone, you end up burning out, it’s a very common thing and well known among developers. Burnout happens because you put a lot of emphasis on that one thing, it’s so important to you that you choose to neglect other things that keep your equilibrium. And somehow the thing that is the most important to you becomes the same thing you can’t stand the most. Pulling a chord too tightly ends up cutting it off, this is what results from this mindset.
It took me 27 years to understand why my career is where it’s, why I didn’t succeed as much as I hoped for in school, and why my social life took a dive and isn’t recovering anytime soon. I’m not encouraging anyone to ignore their academic or professional life but, to try to have a healthier more balanced life.
Maybe falling behind can help you move ahead.
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