Overcoming Disillusionment
Falling through the gap of dreams and reality
“That new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view … was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her dream” - Middlemarch
For me, entering adulthood felt like a series of disillusionments where the promise of each phase of life fell flat in comparison to my idealistic expectations. I believed strongly in the collective myths we tell ourselves about higher education and work. “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I daydreamed that each successive step would propel me to some amorphous dream life.
As a child, I spent a lot of time reading science fiction. Engineers were heroes. They were natural builders who made the lives of everyone better. They tinkered and built out of curiosity and the desire to make the world a better place. Their uncompromising vision could bring impossible things to life. I wanted to go to college to become an engineer of science fiction ability.
One of my many faults was (and still is) preferring my imagined world to the one we actually live in.
Fast forward to the end of college, I had spent weeks agonizing about finding a job that satisfied high-sounding constraints such as lucrative, prestigious, growth opportunities, making the world a better place, etc. I eventually ended up taking a software engineering job at Amazon. Maybe this wouldn’t be my dream job yet, but this would be, just like the many years of schooling prior, a stepping stone to get there.
After getting placed on a team, I remember that each morning I’d race up the stairs to our 6th-floor windowed office, eager to start the day and learn everything there was about software engineering. Somehow, just over a year later, I would use those same stairs to delay my arrival by a few precious minutes, lagging on floor landings and slowing down as the floor numbers increased.
The transition from an ambitious stair climber to a laggard came slowly.
While I felt that some of the lofty things I wanted out of a job had been compromised, I hoped to spend my time tackling tough and important problems. Instead, I struggled with basic tasks like setting up my development environment or getting our application to compile. Part of my disillusionment came from confronting my own limitations.
The team I was on was also unusual: we had something like 20+ engineers at the company famous for two-pizza teams (usually 6-10 people). As one of two new grads on this massive team, I struggled to advocate for myself. My manager skipped 1:1s for months. The big projects were reserved for veteran engineers clamoring for a promotion. This did not feel like a place where I could become a science fiction-level engineer.
And finally, working to increase the profits of the then-world’s largest market-cap company weighed on me. I didn’t feel committed to the work which may be a science fiction engineer’s most important trait.
The combination of these things left me with a growing feeling of unease. Then, one dark Seattle night, I went to sleep and awoke in a vast movie theater. My life stretched before me in a series of silent scenes. The scene of getting a promotion and then feeling completely empty after. The scene of graying hair and weary eyes looking at a computer screen in a cubicle. The scene of a marriage not taken for love but for escaping from loneliness. Real and unreal became indistinguishable. I woke up in a pool of sweat and found a scrap of paper to write down, “a life where you settle for everything.”
I left Amazon after 1 year, 1 month, and 28 days.
Disillusion comes from the recognition that the path we’re currently on does not hold up to our imagined one. Therefore, disillusionment is the signal that there’s some fundamental incompatibility between belief and current reality. Eventually, disillusionment resolves itself through discarding prior beliefs in favor of reality, holding fast to beliefs and discarding reality, or some combination of the two.
Having grasped some aspect of this reality, I sought a different one. I moved to New York City to attend the Recurse Center, a “writer’s retreat for programmers.” Looking back at my response to the application question “where do you see yourself in two years?” I see that my beliefs had not wavered:
In two years, I want to firmly believe that the only constraint separating imagination from reality is time. I want the freedom and capability to explore and to make. I believe the path to this point consists of growing as much as possible, becoming a better programmer, and relentlessly turning ideas into reality.
There’s the wild hunger and idealism of my youth. I must have been insufferable.
The Recurse Center ended up being one of the best experiences of my life, not another stepping stone to some promised future. I learned more of my limits in a more forgiving setting. I also began to understand that many of my beliefs had come about somewhat arbitrarily. Rather than feeling disillusioned, this time I let my beliefs update towards a more nuanced perspective.
These days, I do not measure myself against the abilities of science fiction engineers but try to do the best I can. Instead of taking inspiration from fictional characters, I seek out role models from the real world. I no longer believe that I need to sacrifice myself in some single-minded endeavor to save the “greater good.” My beliefs and reality have finally come together.
Recommended Reading
Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail by John Salvatier
A blog post about a profound idea that is captured in the title. In an effort to make our lives easier, our brain ignores details irrelevant to our day-to-day activity. We only appreciate the fiddliness of reality when we’re new to something. When was the last time you considered the incredible complexity of a computer, the internet, running water, or even something as seemingly simple as a kitchen fork?
“It’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you.” Once we’re stuck in a frame, things around us become boring. We see things on their most surface level
John’s advice is to “seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.” There are so many things to notice wherever you’re sitting. When was the last time you thought about how your chair was constructed? Could you do it yourself?