It has been quite interesting to take advantage of this time away from work (and the completion of a few major family health milestones) to reflect on my life.
I've forgotten which philosopher wrote that the life unexamined is not worth living (it's attributed to Socrates - I had to look it up, of course * eye roll at self * ), but that's something I've done since my teen years (typically for my birthday, though - engineering and family health matters have stopped me doing that for some years now).
I won't list all the many posts I've done on that topic on this blog (I did two in my very first month of blogging - see here and here - three, if you count the "about me" post), but I will link to a post I did today on my political blog on changes that have occurred as a result of the pandemic.
That post ends with the following:
On that last one, probably the most noticeable effects here is the growth and likely permanence of work from home (see here and here), but there have also been a few "tree/sea changes" and, perhaps overseas more than here, what is being referred to (and possibly over-emphasised) as "the Great Resignation" (see here, here, here, and here - and note this).
It is terrible that it has taken millions of deaths and the devastation to billions of lives of a pandemic for people to make such fundamental realisations.
Throughout my life, I have been out of step with the materialism and lack of caring of the society I was living in - and even on material aspects, I am out of touch - for instance, Australian houses are rubbish: flimsy, unsuited to the climate, and built to pack as much superficial glitz as can be tacked on to a cheap frame (I argued in the 80s with an architect that Australian houses needed verandahs because air conditioning [which many could not afford then] was an unsustainable response to housing inadequacy).
I've made some major changes in my life (such as leaving Queensland) that would be difficult to reverse, even if I wanted to. In fact, writing recently about my realisation that the online community I am looking for is actually the one I left, which I'm unlikely to rejoin, led me to spend some time on what people colloquially refer to as "burned bridges".
Those include:
- the aforementioned online group;
- several ex's;
- several people who I thought were friends who weren't;
- sailing (initially, I left because of the financial demands of the family I had just taken on, but with the benefit of hindsight and distance, I've realised just how bigotted some people in that world are); and
- I refuse to use facebook - which has cost me quite a few opportunities, but that platform has been flawed from the beginning, IMO.
I don't regret those decisions - I regret some of the consequences, but I still consider the decisions I made were sound. (Sometimes I have regretted the work/commitments I have taken on, but if I hadn't, other people's lives would have been worse, so my regret has been reframed by me into regretting that I didn't know a more efficient way to help.)
The one bridge that I "unburned" was engineering, and I do regret that "unburning" - not from the point of the technical side of wastewater treatment (it has been good to see the community finally accept the forms of reuse I and many others have been advocating for for decades), but from the work situation (intensity & rate of work [which has damaged my health over those decades], multiplicity of deadlines and projects, ultra-conservative colleagues, stress generally, etc).
What is next?
From a practical point of view (including age discrimination around changes of career), I cannot get out of engineering, and we're unlikely to get the living situation I've been dreaming of for decades, so I have no obvious areas of life where I might burn bridges, but that's the thing about life: you can never be sure what's up next.
At least if something like that does come up, I've been through it before, and that helps.
