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Your life is on the line. Not just any part but the most intelligent, powerful and authentic part, which you've just entered. I will assume you're asking ~is this thing called "engineering career" worth my life?~ If you're not, good luck. My advice: do not ignore this call. Worth, meaning, value, etc, stems from the framework through which you make sense of the world, aka your worldview. If you're a scientific atheist, then heck yes, what a bargain! Your life is entirely worthless. Eventually you'll disappear, then your family line will, then humanity, the Earth, our galaxy, and in the end all information will be permanently erased in a big crunch or its opposite, when atoms themselves are pulled apart by gravity, science is yet to decide which. If you are a theist (Christian, Hindu, and many more), then an inextricable part of you is the deity itself, and your life is worth everything. These are examples. Neither I nor anyone else can give you a worldview. You have to dig for it yourself. Your inkling is the calling of your meaning in life, the lack of which you express. Almost by tautology, meaning in life is the most difficult yet rewarding thing you can pursue. I can give you some leads. Christianity and Platonism are the Western civilization, to which your engineering career and therefore you belong. If you are ignorant of those, you will be fundamentally lost. Study those. Because you devoted the first half of your life to rational pursuits, trace the birth of mathematics and physics from Platonism. I promise, this history is replete with meaning. Study the worldviews of Galileo, Newton and Leibniz. Study Einstein and Heisenberg. But study their critics also, very importantly the deeply flawed yet unavoidable philosophical response called Skepticism or Anti-rationalism. Finally study a new twist on rationalism that can be called Creative or Open philosophy, first expressed by mathematician philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred N. Whitehead. The scientific method does not give life meaning. Philosophy leads to it, and religion (broadly re-ligio = re-connection, as in with the deity) is it. Yet there is a source of deep meaning hidden within science and technology, which is the main reason it's so powerful. You can find it if you look. Large organizations often hate philosophy and fundamental questions because they already have their "correct" foundations. They want human cogs in their system. Trash all ideologies, seek out people whose life is deeply meaningful in books and life, and think deeply about your own foundations with your own open mind. |