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Holy shit, it’s been almost 3 months???

The holidays probably don’t count, do they? So many people around, so many parties, so much activity; it wouldn’t have made any difference in my life if I had a job, because I probably wouldn’t have done it very effectively anyhow.

Then again, I’ve started to wonder if I ever really did my job effectively once I stopped being tactical and started being more “strategic”. It took me a really long time to realize that for all of Cisco’s talk about innovation and “bold bets”, it’s actually a painfully risk-averse organization, utterly incapable of anything approaching innovation without an acquisition. It can’t organize labor effectively to move from concept to execution to delivery; it can only take a delivered project and operationalize the marketing, sales, and support for it.

Had I realized this fact sooner, I would have done my (most recent) job wildly differently, in one of 3 ways:

1. I would have dedicated more time to building my ideas instead of pitching my ideas. I started to get pretty good at building stories for why we should take a particular direction or how to intercept where we thought the market was going…but it was a dead end if the company was incapable of taking my idea through to delivery. It’s like convincing an urban coffee shop to make better coffee by growing their own coffee beans. If I were really serious about bringing something to the light of day, I would have taken any spare time and just started building.

Of course, the thought of taking “spare time” like nights and weekends to build something to overcome the paralysis of bureaucracy was pure anathema to my values regarding labor exploitation, so it couldn’t have happened at this point in my career. So if I felt that strongly about the idea I had I would have…

2. Spun out or just created a startup. Spinning out probably would have been nigh impossible in the post-MPLS regime, but I probably could have found some allies in our M&A orgs to make strategic investments in promising new companies with potentially disruptive technologies.

But man, that sounds like a lot of work. And while I’m not allergic to hard work at all when I’m emotionally invested, my general malaise towards current technological trends means I would have definitely not been emotionally invested unless my ideas were centered around decreasing humanity’s dependency on network devices…in which case the likelihood of getting a strategic investment from Cisco (or funding from most VCs) approached zero.

3. Built relationships outside the company and advocate way way more strongly to acquire and/or invest in startups that were doing the things best aligned to my strategic vision. Again, pitfalls abound with this idea, as I would have been doing activities outside of my job description and traditional spheres of influence…plus the whole aforementioned “general malaise” would have been strongly demotivating to such pursuits. Still, if I still wanted a paycheck and was willing to turn a blind eye to my values and impact on the world, it’s probably a pretty compelling way to be valuable and well-connected.

I think burnout was inevitable no matter the direction. I was well compensated to not do any of those things and instead say smart things to influential people so that we took tiny baby steps to be more relevant to our customers…but that clearly wasn’t lighting my fire. All the grunt work I would have poured into more “valuable” endeavors would have probably left me disillusioned when they inevitably didn’t work out or inevitably made me feel worse about the world I was creating…and probably didn’t have the same financial benefit (or certainly bang for the buck) of my baseline activity.

All of this just reinforces one of the central themes of Bullshit Jobs: in order for a job to be well compensated, it has to be bullshit.

I’ve also come to appreciate the significance of social organization for our day to day human experience: our species has made up a ton of fake (i.e., inherently meaningless) concepts to provide structure to our existence and quell some of the miasma of uncertainty constantly swirling in our overdeveloped brains. By willingly participating in these constructs and doing our best to win all the games, we can conveniently avoid those nagging questions of why we’re here and what matters. And I’m genuinely torn about what to do about it, because using the 48 laws of power to navigate my way would probably be pretty fulfilling (even if I’ve never consciously done so until now), but I doubt it would make me feel any better about my place in the universe(s), which I find to be painfully lacking in any bigger story beyond “we exist for a while and then we don’t”.

And yet, despite this malaise about progress (or the idea that progress is inherently good), and this cynicism about bureaucracy, and this ennui with existence itself…I actually feel incredible about my life. My individual situation is so overwhelmingly great that I don’t feel strongly compelled right now to actually accomplish anything else with my life. I can just be:

Right here.
Right now.
And that’s not just ok,
It’s actually wonderful.

I celebrate this milestone not for any judgment of the milestone itself, but the fact that I reached a milestone. I reached a new equilibrium point of existence that I didn’t have before. I was constantly trying to do more or have more or be more, not necessarily anything novel in the universe, but just something…else. All the drivers for that were external; I felt like I was squandering my existence otherwise, by not aligning myself with a core value or deeper cause. But when I search inside myself, I feel no such compulsion. I don’t have a terrible wound I’m trying to heal. I don’t have a painful trauma I’m constantly trying to overcome. I don’t have a void that I’m trying to fill. I have plenty of flaws that manifest themselves in plenty of ways, but I’m not fundamentally broken.

This point is important, for I believe that pain is what drives action. That action can be a short-term avoidance of the pain, like self-medication or distraction…or it can be a long-term mitigation of the pain, like acceptance or even welcoming. I’ve been working on a lot of the long-term mitigation, and to have reached this point is a validation of the hard work I’ve been putting in—to understand all of my parts, and how those parts interact with the parts of others, and how everybody is a dynamic whirlwind of interchanging personas that we may or may not be able to control individually, and that we CERTAINLY can’t control interpersonally. It’s freedom to realize that all I can really ever control is myself (and even then, it’s not about changing any of my parts but influencing when they show up).

But that freedom is a freedom from pain. Sure, there are always irritations, but I don’t have a deep, sinking feeling about my plight. My plight is not a plight at all.

Now, will it last? No idea. Next month I might be bored out of my mind. Or I might stay this way for 50 years. I have a hard time believing I won’t keep evolving, but maybe this is it. And right now, that would be just fine and dandy.