My disillusionment and aspirations

I’m having a hard time articulating things right now, so please bear with me. I’m recovering from being triggered earlier today when I heard Trump claim that pesticides are responsible for the “rise” in autism cases. I feel like I’m sufficiently cooled off, but some of my anger might still be lingering in the background, which may affect my ability to be objective here.

Anyway.

My failure to wrap my head around Kubernetes today as I tried to setup a three-node cluster has made me realize that I don’t particularly like all this containerization and catering to corporate infrastructure needs in the tech industry. I’m not dunking on the merits of the technology – it undoubtedly solves a great many problems. It’s just that those problems are not something I’m personally interested in solving.

I’m feeling more of an affinity toward minimalism, the Unix philosophy, and suckless.org principles.

Since I’ve graduated from uni with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, I’ve felt this anxiety regarding finding a job, and this kind of spurred me toward thinking I need to learn DevOps technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and other cloud-based services. I no longer want to feel that anxiety. It has prevented me from following my curiosity in learning things I’ve wanted to learn when I first became interested in computer science, because I’ve always felt like I needed to prioritize those job skill requirements.

I’m 36 years old, and I’m starting to worry that I might never find a career doing something I love and have a deep appreciation for. $400 a month in disability benefits is not sustainable. If it wasn’t for my family, I’d probably be homeless and/or working at a job that doesn’t pay a living wage anyway, let alone making enough to pay off my student debt. I’m disillusioned by this university education culture that promised a better life outcome if I earned a degree. This feels like such a scam when I realize the skills I learned as a computer science major could have been learned on my own, without putting myself into $70k student debt. I know this is a unique-to-me situation, and other C.S. graduates have gotten jobs and are making good money. But I’d bet that few if any of them have had to deal with debilitating mental illness for their entire adult life. I’d also bet that the majority of them are working at corporate offices, in service to the American capitalist GDP machine.

My ideal job would be something that helps a community and is centered around my values regarding digital freedom, privacy, anti-Big corporate, information freedom, and free and open source software. Those are the societal problems I am interested in solving.