Since I'm about to graduate in a while, and since these are the times when a lot of people start asking you about your future plans, I thought to write about this. Though most of the people are such that you just have to give them an artificial answer to satisfy them because they are not in the mood of trying to understand the idea I want to convey, there are also some people who are in this mood, and so I might be sharing this with them.
Most of the things we do are a means to a certain end. What happens many a time is that people get so engrossed in trying to figure out the means that they do not give much thought about exactly what kind of end they would want to achieve, and thus it's no wonder that many a times, when people end up achieving the exact end that they themselves wanted years ago, they regret it, or at-least do not like it as much as they thought they would.
So, I believe it's a better thing to start from the end, and then retrace back the means. But there are issues with this approach as well. Because when most people think about an end, they are not thinking about the true end itself but also another means a level high up. For instance, if you ask college students about what kind of work do they ideally want, they would list out different sorts of careers, but what they are actually targeting via any specific career path is a vague concept of the work that would allow them live their ideal kind of life. For instance, two persons might want to adopt two different careers, but both are actually targeting careers that allow them to make the most amount of money, but even making most of money is a means for another end, one of which could be to lead a comfortable life, or another could be to have a certain status in society.
Living a comfortable life or having status in society etc. are actually very simplistic notions, but I'm mentioning them because these are the closest thing to a true end that most people would have thought about their work. In reality, targeting for one or two concrete variables to optimize their life for, is often not a good idea, and subconsciously, people try to optimize against a wide range of preferences with different priority and weightage.
Now, the apparent problem with these preferences is that they change over time. But first, it needs to be realized that a lot of times, what changes over time is not your underlying preferences about the kind of life you want to live, but rather your reasoning about adopting what means allow you to optimize for those underlying preferences. Now, when I think about the instances when your underlying preferences actually change, it's only because of you having imperfect information, sometimes about the world and sometimes about yourself. In some of the cases, this information gap can be somewhat improved by thinking out about these things in a structured manner, but the true bridging of this gap happens in the real world, when you actually dip your toes in the water. So, the solution, to the changing preferences problem is to increase the surface area of interaction of your inner self with the external world and then being actually thoughtful and perceptive about those interactions so that you gather maximum information about your inner reality and the external reality and their interaction. In other words, it can be said, you have to speed-run experimentation around your life, but not in a blind manner, but rather a perceptive and thoughtful manner, so that your learnings from the previous experiments guide you about what next to experiment.
This was a very long tangent, but I think it can be used as a fair enough idea for explaining where I currently stand.
Over the last three years, I have been doing experimentations, but initially I was not very thoughtful about them, and I was definitely not speed-running them, however, over the years, it has improved. Owing to these, I have got some idea of my underlying preferences or the true end I would want to achieve, however, I have yet to figure out what exact form of work would allow me to optimize for them.
The words means and the end give the impression that one follows the other in time. But if we consider, a given point in time, or a certain kind of life one is living, then we can distinguish that certain form into two things, let's call them essence and the body. The body represents a specific concrete form of exterior reality, while essence represents the core idea which is abstract and sort of undefinable in a sense -- something difficult to enclose in a jar of words.
So, I have somewhat learned about the essence of the kind of things I would want to work on in life, but I am trying to figure out what exactly the specific body or structure of the work would look like.
Now, that I am thinking, maybe, that essence is not actually that undefinable. There are a certain elements of it which are difficult to structure out in words, but still a lot of it can still be structured out in words. It seems I wrote that this was undefinable because I did not want to define it, either here in this blogpost, or maybe I was just playing around with myself not wanting to think structurally about it, or maybe, that phrasing "difficult to enclose in a jar of words" was interesting enough that I did not want to delete it, but anyway, I think this pretty much sums up about my current situation.
I have got an intuitive sense of the kind of work I would want to do in life, but I have no idea of specifics of that yet. Maybe, I will try to wordify this intuitive sense some other time.