Vocational, Not Careerist

I felt tired after a long Thursday work. Felt like, I don’t wanna sit at the office more. So Friday I asked for a work from home morning. And an afternoon off just by my instinct without clear reason. Went to a coffee book shop in the morning. Sat down with the laptop and open the personal project issue I’d been working on for a while. And something funny happened. Without someone next to me pushing speed over quality, without the deadline suffocation, without the project-status anxiety, the pure curiosity and exploring made me felt… really happy at that moment. I shared this experience with the AI, as I would usually do. Told it about how my boss looks like to me, a fully scheduled man, always jumping between meetings, between boundary of project manager and an engineer but I don’t think he’s good at the engineer side anymore, and I was wondering, if I ever be like him. It told me about Carmack.

When I first read about him, it sounds cool. He didn’t do IMO. He didn’t go to Stanford. He didn’t run marathons or wake up at 5am to read business books. He just, locked himself in a room with hard problems for years and came out with engines that bent the industry. Curiosity-density, not schedule-density. Anti-meeting. Deep-work only. I don’t really understand about the topic he worked on and earned so much recognition. But I like his vibe and maybe that’s someone I like to be. Someone who devotes his life on the pure of tech, of design, of craft. Just doing the work because doing the work is enough.

I’m probably never going to be Carmack. The thing is, such shape exists. And realizing that landed on something that’s been off in me for a long time.

the cost of refusing the game

I went to a college, having a major in computer science. First semester I got a scholarship. Then for the next four years my GPA just kept dropping. Ended at 3.1. Not bad, but well below what I started at.

For a long time I told myself the story was, “I got arrogant.” Or “maybe I’m not as smart as I thought.” A lot of people from that arc do this. We blame ourselves because the alternative is harder.

Real story is different. Those who finished with scholarships had a method. Befriend the senpais and get past exam papers. Drill those papers. Pick the easy-score teachers. Allocate effort by ROI. Aim explicit at the scholarship.

I didn’t like that. I still don’t. If I redid those four years I’d feel the same. I came to college because computer science sounded interesting. I was reading random papers, getting lost in compiler internals, building tiny side projects, looking for people passionating about crafts, that didn’t help my GPA. The metric and the activity were not the same activity. I was running the curiosity loop inside a system that was scoring the exam-game loop.

So my GPA dropped, and the kids who played got scholarships and big-tech offers and trips around the world. Here I am.

That’s the cost of refusing the game. It’s a real cost. It’s not nothing. I look around sometimes and feel it sharp.

what the archetype actually means

The shape is rare. Not necessarily better than the other shapes. Just real, and recognizably itself.

What I notice is, I look at my classmates or my colleagues, they’re smart. Equally smart, maybe smarter than me. Some of them work harder than I do. None of them are inferior in talent. But when they work, work is, you know, work. The job. Tasks to clear. A salary to justify. They get a bit more experience each year, they ship things, they go home and switch off. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m saying it’s a different relationship to the same activity.

At my day job the same things happen as for them. Tickets clear, features ship, praise comes when output is fine. The difference isn’t there. The difference is what happens after.

The thing I work on at night, the thing I’ve been quietly building for months and might never ship, that one updates me. If I stop, I’m not one less project lighter. I’m slightly less me. If you’re wired for it and you try to live the other way, the work feels hollow even when you’re performing fine.

I don’t know what this means for me. Maybe Phileas never goes anywhere, this blog stays small, none of it accumulates into anything anyone calls a career. I think I’d still keep going. Not because I expect a payoff. Just because the doing is the point. The slowness is the becoming. The becoming is the thing.