Happiness as a Dev
A Game Dev’s (Thor’s) Life Advice
A wholistic view of living a happy life as a developer in including perspective of the job, money, and empowerment.
Your Job
I think a lot of the times, especially here in America, we base our entire personality on the jobs that we keep, frankly. When you ask somebody, what do you do? They usually respond with what their job is, here.
Many other places in the world don’t do that. They say, oh, here are all my hobbies. “These are the places I hang out. This is what I do. But here we say what our job is.” We tie our jobs so closely to our identity here that it’s hard to see ourselves as anything other than our work.
But to be honest with you, we’re not our work. You’re not there for meaning. You do your hobbies for meaning. You have your relationships with friends for meaning. You have your family for meaning.
Training and Empowerment
…you know? It sucks.
I have worked many a place, my dude. In a lot of different corporate environments. And let me tell you, pay doesn’t always fix everything. Training and empowerment does. If somebody enjoys a job, they’re much more willing to do that job better. Regardless of pay. And if they’re empowered to fix things that are objectively wrong, in their environment, they’re gonna be able to fix those things. And they’re gonna feel good about the job.
There’s nothing worse than having a job where you can fix something for a customer or an employee and know that you’re not allowed to fix that problem and that management doesn’t care. Nothing’s worse than that. That’s like the worst place to be, man. Immediately you feel powerless and shitty about the position, right? If they like and respect their manager, they’ll be willing to work harder.
Happiness
I was paid a quarter million dollars a year to hack power plants for the federal government when I worked for the DOE.
You know what I do now? Make dramatically less money. You know what? I’m a lot happier. I’m just like a lot happier overall. You may not realize this, you’re probably much younger now.
Later on in your life, it’s all the same hamburger. Money doesn’t matter as long as your bills are paid. You want to have a good day. Your happiness is worth more than the paycheck. I could have made that money. I could have lived easy doing that shit. But I would be very shitty.
Self Investment
Let’s say that AI in the future takes your job away, and you didn’t plan for this. You didn’t learn anything. Well, then the outcome is that nothing happens, but you’re exactly the same.
Let’s say that AI in the future takes your job away, but you learned a bunch of stuff. Well, the outcome in the future is that you can adapt to the situation. It’s fine. So don’t worry about AI. It doesn’t matter.
Let’s say that AI in the future doesn’t take your job away, but you decided not to learn anything because AI may take your job. But the outcome is that you didn’t learn anything and AI is not there to stop. So like, you get nothing.
Let’s say AI doesn’t take your job in the future and you learn a bunch of shit. Guess what? You still win. So the only option in this equation is learning shit. Because if you learn shit, you always win. And if you don’t learn shit, you always lose. So the AI is irrelevant.
Invest in yourself. Don’t worry about it.
