The season I’m in is very unusual. On its surface, it’s a time for study and a time to prepare for a major career shift that could steer the course of the rest of my life. But under the surface, something much deeper is happening.
Several times this past year, my jaw became sore during the day. It took me awhile to figure it out, but the reason my jaw would get sore was that I had been grinding my teeth at night. This has happened on rare occasions over the years, but it was unusual that it would happen during my year off. My dentist once explained to me that people often do this when they are under a lot of stress, but what kind of stress could I have been experiencing? I had lots of money and an incredibly free schedule. Could stress really have been haunting me in my sleep?
The strange truth is, my year off of work was very stressful. At first, it was the tedious process I had to follow to get my passport, then it was navigating the insanity of signing up for a health care plan, then it was planning out my first trip to Nepal, all of which was very administrative in nature, and all of which I really hated doing. But even after the first trip went perfectly…things still weren’t quite right. I had all of these lists of things I was trying to get done, and before I knew it, I was planning my next trip, which was also stressful to plan. I had a few scanning projects I was trying to wrap up, and they were sitting pretty heavily on my shoulders, too, and none of this was considering all of the books I was trying to read.
Something just didn’t feel right.
I don’t think it was until after I got back from my second trip that it dawned on me: I had assumed that quitting my job would release me from all the stress. Granted, my job had not been particularly stressful, but it had occasionally been stressful enough. But I realized that the real stress that had come to form the cosmic background radiation of my life had never had anything to do with work but everything to do with…me.
Nobody had held a gun to my head and forced me to build a list of obligations. Nobody had forced me to buy tons of books I could never realistically hope to both read and understand in a reasonable amount of time. Nobody had signed me up for all of the commitments I had heaped on myself. Only I had done that.
You think you are doing a good thing. You think that being busy is good. You think that productivity is worth it. But you could be 100% wrong.
In fact, it’s kind of laughable. I’m afraid I must admit I’m very much a hypocrite in the midst of all of this. I say that I hate the pressure to be productive, but I still live by it. I say that school was worthless and brainwashed me, but I still think that reading books is the best way to learn. I say that I hate hustle culture, but I kind of live hustle culture (even though I’m not very good at it).
I wonder if I hate these things because they are inside of me and I can’t get them out.
The other day, I spent a lot of time thinking about all of the technical books I’m trying to get through. I have/had a laundry list of books to read through, and was thinking, “Okay, if it takes me one week to get through each book, that means that in…4 or 5 months, I could be done”.
4 or 5 months? What are you smoking, dude? You need to get focused if you really want to get anything done, if you really want to put those critical few extra technologies on your resume. Why in the world are you so obsessed with finishing these books? Besides, reading a book is not the same as learning from it!
It sounds terribly melodramatic, but the hard truth is that I’m running. Oh, am I running hard.
Most sane people do not have any issue owning books they haven’t read. The books sit there and do nothing. Why be bothered by that? But this has always bothered me greatly, and I think I finally realize now that it’s because I’ve always known I didn’t buy those books for the right reasons, that I was always looking for something in those books that I was never going to find. Sometimes, you just know when something is wrong, and it bothers you, because you can feel it.
Turning to knowledge was also my escape from feeling unacceptable. Sure, we all go through that. Some people tune out to streaming services, some to alcohol. There are any number of behaviors to compensate for any number of dysfunctions. It is different for everyone. But when a few certain things back in high school didn’t work out, the only thing that made me feel good was that I was academically talented. If only I could be good enough, smart enough, read enough books, then maybe I would be okay. And this would be reinforced when I was pushed out of my first software job and struggled to find employment. “You don’t know enough…you aren’t smart enough…you aren’t experienced enough…so face the trenches, you lazy idiot. This is all your fault, after all!”
And now that I’m in a similar position, having applied for jobs I largely don’t qualify for, some of those feelings have come back. That’s what’s coming out. And I realize that it needed to be now, or how else would I ever get around to dealing with it? It’s far too easy to ignore when times are good.
There are times I hate reading. I really do. I read a few pages, then just want to throw the book across the room. I love reading in small doses, but I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have some reading obligation on one of my awful, never-ending, impossible lists. It wears you down over time. It rots your soul.
I remember back in 8th grade science class. Everybody else would skip to the labs instead of reading the chapter, but a few times I just did my own thing and tried to read through the appropriate section of the textbook in class, the way things had originally been designed. Those labs, and all labs, really, always scared me, because I was always so confused on what to do, so confused by the directions, scared I didn’t really understand what I was doing, scared I couldn’t do them, just going through the motions, and everybody else seemed to know what to do. “Holy shit”, I thought when I remembered this the other day, “I’m still doing that, aren’t I?”
In science class, I had been reading the book out of fear I wouldn’t be able to do the labs if I didn’t. In a similar way, reading books has often become an excuse to avoid the hard nature of actually learning. There’s a certain “hit” I get from finishing a book, even though there’s no guarantee I learned anything from it. Rather than pursue the uncertain, unclear nature of true learning and possibly face the fact that I can’t actually do it, or that it might take me a long time to do, I’ve opted for reading instead. It is so much easier to focus on reading, which has a defined beginning and end, and the associated satisfaction of “being done”, rather than learning, which is gradual, and slow, and takes effort, and rarely has the same satisfying and clear ending.
I needed the book to prove I knew something, because that’s how all of academia is structured. For the longest time, books were all humans really had for learning academic subjects, so even though there are far better formats for learning these days, the bias hasn’t gone away. And it’s still in me, too. I’m still following what all the school teachers told me, that reading the book makes you a good student. I want to be a good student, because being a good student makes you acceptable. And that’s what you think you need, when you don’t feel acceptable in any other way.
The stress that I live with is a form of inner torment. At some point, I decided that this was easier than dealing with the harder issues. I’ve been reaping the ill rewards for a very long time now.
Fortunately, though, I’m a fairly practical person. It has slowly become obvious that reading all of these books is unlikely to accomplish anything for my career. What makes it hard, though, is that all of these books are full of “useful” information. Why would you get rid of useful information? Couldn’t that play a role in my career, too?
Time. That’s why. So many of these books didn’t need to be purchased since they weren’t immediately useful. Sure, you can buy the book for the 401 class, but if you haven’t read the book for the 101 class, it could be awhile, so why buy it now? Why not buy it at the right time, instead? That’s a good analogy for how I’ve done things: I often buy the 401 books when it doesn’t make any sense, then hold onto them because they are still potentially useful.
Moreover, books tend to be all-or-nothing in my head. What I like about certifications is that they expose you to subjects you might not come across normally, and this can really expand your understanding of the bigger picture. But if you treat all of your studies like that, you end up with a ton of useless information, assuming you can even remember all of the content, and I usually can’t. See, even when I read those chapters back in science class, I rarely remembered anything from them. The sense of obligation itself shoved out the prospect of actually learning. So it really did start to make sense to just join the others and do the labs because at least that way I got the labs done. And when you’re dealing with technology, you really want to weigh the ROI carefully, because some knowledge becomes obsolete overnight, while other knowledge might be useful your entire career.
And it’s just…stupid…to commit months of your life to read $100 or $200 worth of books. If I really want to learn penetration testing, I’m going to have to be focused on that, and not busy reading this that and the other.
And I also wonder what it must be like to be truly free. Imagine taking a year off, with absolutely nothing planned, absolutely no obligations…. [I’ve long suspected I need a wife who is more spontaneous and carefree than me]
So, as usual, I donated a bunch of books the other day. Gosh, does it feel good. It always feels good. But…I think it’s different this time, too. Because I really want to deal with those deeper issues…if I don’t, it’s just going to be the same story I’ve been repeating for well over a decade: over-commit to learning, let the books and obligations pile up, feel crushed, tell yourself this is fine, grind your teeth at night and hate yourself until you snap and get rid of things, rinse and repeat. It will never stop if it isn’t stopped at the root.
Right now I still have a few books I want to get through, but I’m already getting impatient with them. Again, they are not all bad, and I don’t think it’s the devil to have some books that sit unread on the bookshelf, but I’m really trying to figure out which of these are truly worth keeping right now, because I have read books before that were perfectly balanced in their cost/reward ratio, and these are rare. Next month, I’m committing to study for the CCNA and grinding through a website that teaches penetration testing using real-life labs [lol, the similarities to my past…at least these labs are fun!]
The other advantage to getting rid of more books, though, is that it leaves me more time for processing, for healing. I feel like these books have been some sort of unhealthy blanket I pull over myself to hide the pain, which of course has only made things worse.
One of the dreams I had that contributed to my decision to switch careers had me in this ultra-clean, modernist, one-floor office building, with lots of glass and light. The only desk there had a computer at it, and that was it. But in a curtained area, there was a very fancy couch, but I didn’t go sit on it because it felt off-limits. It turns out, it was more of an invitation. But the setting was awesome, because that’s how I’d love my career to be: elegant, straightforward, clean, clear. It’s not that I’m not willing to put effort into it – I think I’ve proven that I am – only that it needs to be spacious and relaxing and full of light. No more of this chaos.