I see myself mainly as a programmer.
For the past six years or so, I’d been putting together a book on happiness.
It’s based mainly on research and contemplation on the ideas in Bertrand Russell’s “The Conquest of Happiness”.
Working on the book helped me a great deal.
It provided me with a framework of happiness.
This is important in my opinion as the software industry can be quite daunting.
There is the time warp for one. (What, it’s been a day! I was just working on exporting a cloud table storage to a local database… What, it’s been 15 years!)
There is the crunch, and it’s important to understand that it may not really be necessary.
There is the high of solving some technical challenges to fulfill your own desire for elegance.
There is the low of finding out that too many times, the immense effort that you’d invested still face a long hard road to eventual value.
There are also many challenges correlating the mathematical beauty of code and the humanities of the real world.
Programmers need to spend time taking care of themselves, psychologically, mentally, philosophically.
Programming at times does give intellectual happiness.
Relying singularly on intellectual happiness may not be ideal (SPOF anyone?)
Programmers can and must embrace other causes of happiness too :)
