[choicenotchance]

  To be honest, the corporate rat race thrives at making people who are otherwise doing quite well with their career progression feel like they're not because that makes them easier to exploit. Life is not an exam to be min-maxed. You don't take that fancy career or lifetime earnings with you when you die, so unless you're doing it for the intrinsic joy of doing it, there's an argument to be made that becoming better at engineering has no guarantee of making your life better.

This. Especially that last line. I feel most of the time I'm just wanting to get more and more, both financially and challenges wise. But to what end? Your words here really calmed me down. I got me thinking. I felt like a dog running after a car.

[yowlingcat]

You and me both, my friend. Perhaps now more than ever before, we are not so much dissatisfied with our careers (with a dissatisfaction that has always been present), but more able to think deeply about why that is the case. In my opinion, the answer isn't pleasant and yet, it's strangely comforting (even freeing) in a sense.

Now that I have accepted that my lasting happiness will not be found in a prestigious job or fame as an engineer, where shall I find it? Perhaps the same place other humans have for the last ten thousand years. In the center of a quiet meadow in the woods. Next to an animal that considers me a friend. In the arms of someone I love. Plucking strings on an instrument, singing my stories.

Is this response a coping mechanism, or an acting choice to minimally engage with the parts of human existence which entail naked power brokering and empire building? Maybe it's a little of both. May we both find our own peace somehow, friend.