Recently I have been giving a lot of thought to a serious attempt to change careers. This is a pretty big deal for me as I’ve mostly been going with the flow since I dropped out of college. I went in to IT contracting after giving up on school and eventually landed a steady job at a phone company for about 5 years. I stayed in the job because it was easy and the pay was okay. By the end of my time there, my day’s work only took me a couple of hours to finish. The rest of the time I spent reading news or playing games. In the time that I worked there, I moved out away from home and got my own apartment. Eventually picked up a house on the cheap that needed some work. Didn’t do much of the work except the necessities for the first couple of years there. Eventually though it was a nice little place to live. My sister moved in and suddenly my social life improved. My job though was clearly a dead end affair. Not much possibility of advancement.

Then the company was bought out by a much larger one and the layoffs began. We went from an office of well over 100 people to about 30 before they moved us to a smaller facility. The trimming continued. Seeing the writing on the wall, I was looking for work elsewhere. One of our managers landed a group of us positions at another telephone company. Not experienced enough to know this was a bad move for me, I left and went to the new company. In hindsight I should have stayed with my old company until they did lay me off so I could at least collect unemployment while looking for a job I might actually want to stay with. I quickly found myself in a high-stress customer service position with the new company and realized I couldn’t hack it. So again, with my lack of experience, I simply quit. I had confidence that I could find something better for me fairly quickly. This turned out to be a foolish belief though. My lack of a college degree severely hampered my ability to land a decent job.

After that, it was a slow and steady slide in to unemployment depression. Good jobs did not fall out of the sky. I spent most a year unemployed, and during that time I was forced to sell my house and move to an apartment. I lived off of my various sources of credit. Definitely a step back. In the end, I decided my life needed a drastic change. I could try to go back to college, get student loans, take on even more debt. Fun times right? Instead I decided to enlist in the military. It was a bit of a crazy idea. I know my family couldn’t have been more surprised as I’ve never been the gung-ho military type. Still, I figured it was worth a shot. Luckily for me, I did quite well on the placement tests and had my pick of jobs within the service. Six years later, I was married and divorced, lived in several states, and had a very marketable set of skills to go with my military experience. I was up for re-enlistment, however the job I really wanted, I wasn’t allowed to switch to. The service gave me an ultimatum: go back to training for more of the same work I’d done for the past several years, or get out. Easy choice. Now I do the same thing, only there’s no military hoopla to deal with on top of the job. The pay is better to. This, finally, gets back to my original point though: money can’t buy happiness.

Now what? This is the question I face every day. Some days it’s a bit easier to ignore than others. It’s a tough question because it leads to a follow-up: what do I want to do? That’s the real 65 million dollar question. What the heck to I want to do with my life? When I was a kid in elementary school, I thought I had that one down. I wanted to be a computer programmer. I certainly spent enough time writing little games. I’ve even used those skills to help with pretty much every job I’ve had from time to time. When I got to college, I arrived with the mistaken expectation that being there would change everything. That I was finally getting the chance to do what I really wanted. My freshman year I took a huge load of general education classes to get them out of the way, so they wouldn’t interfere with what I was really there to learn. So the next year, I get in to my first Computer Science classes. They sucked. Perhaps it was how they were delivered. After all, an auditorium lecture format is not ideal for teaching a programming language. I was hugely disappointed, and it showed in my grades. After the first semester, I dropped out to take a break. Figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Guess I’m still figuring.

So what is the answer? I don’t really know. I wouldn’t mind investing for a living, at least giving it a shot anyway, but I definitely don’t have the kind of money to really get that going unless I get lucky. I could try to break back in to the computer programming business, but it’s getting a bit late for that. I also do not relish spending the rest of my life in some cubicle, pounding away on some program I don’t really care about. There’s freelance programming of course. Indie game development and such. Now is certainly a good time for Indie games. Hell, I’ve got over 400 hours in Terraria. Every time I’m bored with everything else, it’s back to Terraria I go. Still, there is one thing I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the guts to try. It’s even something I can do, though with difficulty, while holding down my current job: writing. I have been an avid reader since the 3rd grade, and have dabbled from time to time in the fine art of writing. The trick though, is that it is extremely difficult to make a living with just writing. A very, very small percentage of writers in this country succeed to the point where writing is all they need to live comfortably. Indeed, many writers have said that money should not be one’s motivation. I can certainly believe that. I guess the question now is am I still willing to give it a shot? Do I invest the immense amount of time needed to polish my skills, write, write, and write some more? Can I handle the inevitable initial rejections? Can I handle the possibility of failure? A dream not pursued is still there to dream about. True failure would kill that dream. Then again, what happens to a dream deferred?