Acting from Fear or Enthusiasm?

I have been catching up to social media over the last 3-4 weeks and have caught up with many of my old friends. Catching up also means waking up to 222 unread WhatsApp messages. This morning I had a thought, "If I just keep checking my messages every 10 minutes, then I won't have to catch up with 700 messages when I miss a night!"

Wow. Really?

I've made my life choices by playing a chess game of, "That path looks less painful than that path." The trouble with it is, I'm busy walking down less painful paths while entirely joyous paths are passing me by. I think this sort of thinking is rooted in the belief that we live in an uncaring universe.

How many of us think in this way? I feel that there's something inherently incomplete in that singular method of making life decisions.

Is the Universe caring or uncaring? Or no wait... Do you Believe in a caring universe or an uncaring one? Good question Einstein. Here's a brilliant article on that:
http://geoffolson.com/page5/page11/page34/page34.html
The world needs more thinkers like you Geoff Olson.

After picking a career that appeared to be less painful than all the other careers out there, here I am. Working in a soul less job that pays well. Hmmm.... what other profession does that remind me of....?

One of the reasons I picked engineering was because the job prospects were supposedly good. I was avoiding homelessness. Is there a conspiracy out there? Why are so many people out there to paint the engineering profession something that it isn't? Job prospects were crap when I graduated. And they were crap for 10 of the 13 years I've been working as an engineer. All the engineering companies WISH they had more engineers to work on the projects... but it's not the shortage of engineers that stops them... it's the limited budget or poor management decisions.

The alternate path to living out of fear-based, doomsday-based questions is to try the other side. I've tried the uncaring universe theory, and it's really not making me happy. So how about the caring universe theory? I think it's time to give that a try.

What if I followed my heart? What if I picked a job that looked even slightly interesting or peaked my curiosity in the least? Would the universe conspire to make me successful? Would engaging myself in something interesting entice me to do a better job than just mindless drudgery?

I know there are enough naysayers on the internet to quash that. Maybe their lives are miserable and they just want to convince others that this is all there is to it. Or maybe they believe so deeply in the uncaring universe that nothing else can be fathomed in their minds.

I suppose it's that naysaying thinking that has made me a good engineer. The Doomsday mentality.

But I'm not going to turn into Nietzsche. I'm also not going to turn into those apathetic soulless engineers haunting those cubicles and corridors. I am at a point where I would rather try something I like and see where it takes me, rather than exist successfully and live miserably.