2025 Accountability

In middle school our language arts teacher had us all complete the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. I came up pretty decisively as ISTJ (Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judging). In some ways, this still tracks.

• I keep a tight, but close friend circle.
• I still overthink the hell out of medium-to-large sized decisions (like purchases).
• I enjoy routine, scheduled things like the morning cup of coffee, or the Tuesday morning trip to the grocery store. When they’re disrupted, it’s a bummer.

In other ways, I have drifted significantly since the Fall of 2004, which is now over a mind-boggling 20 years ago.

Introversion has given way to Extraversion. Working in a retail drugstore for five years, followed by a consulting firm for four years, brought out the soft skills in me. I can now crush an interview or presentation. One former colleague still calls me “Mr. Consulting” based on the ways I carry conversations. Teammates want me to lead meetings. (It probably helps that I’m accused of having a “radio voice”, but I bet the microphone helps out a lot there.)

Sensing has given way to iNtuition. To some extent, I think this had to happen if my career change from actuary to engineer was ever going to be successful. My biggest work successes that have led to promotion and opportunity have come from exploring new possibilities that others had overlooked or cast aside.

Thinking has given way to Feeling. This paradigm shift really got going in the late stages of my career as an actuary, when I realized it would be difficult to ever find work that matched with my personal values. (We talked about this a bunch last time, and it’s very much still a work-in-progress.)

Judging has given way to Perceiving. I’ve found that some of my best moments as a software engineer have come after days of zero progress, followed by hours and hours of absurdly productive output. And who doesn’t love a spontaneous trip to the Chicken Fiesta?

Lately as I continue to change with the world, I’ve found that some of my more rigid systems for navigating day-to-day life have broken down and started to weigh on me. I regularly use and love Todoist for remembering daily tasks, but last week I forcibly removed the “Due date” on ~40 or so overdue TODOs that were sitting in there. Some of them dated back to December 2023 and were a constant reminder of projects that were unfinished as I scrolled past them everyday…not healthy.

I see this TODO purge as a microcosm of a greater failure. Generally speaking, something significant collapsed for me mentally last year. I quit Capital One right at the end of 2023, after the realization that wait, it might not have just been actuarial that was a turn-off for me: maybe it’s just corporations in general.

That conclusion led me to make the grand proclamation that I would be attempting to make it through at least half of 2024 on my own, without a corporation paying my bills for me. The desired pursuit was making a video game, which has long been a dream of mine. But winter (if you can call it winter anymore) quickly turned into spring with not much to show for it, aside from completing a few personal projects:

• finally tackling the totes of Mom and Dad’s documents that have been sitting in the closet for 15 years now
• setting up an internal music server, which we use everyday (and that I still owe everyone a technical writeup/guide for)

When April hit and my first software boss reached out to me to make a return to W-2 life, I caved pretty quickly. I couldn’t stomach burning another month of savings, and the creative juices were not flowing nearly well enough for me to construct any sort of reasonable timeline for sustainable self-employment. So I spent the last eight months of the year back in the corporate world, at Fetch Rewards.

By all external accounts, this was successful. I’ve been promoted already after saving us a bunch of money on a project, and got the chance to deliver a well-received talk about converting Python code to Rust that about 30 internal folks attended.

Despite the success, I have yet to fully accept that 2024 was a productive year…but I’m working on accepting it (and writing this article is part of that process). It’s pretty clear to me in hindsight that at the end of 2023 I was absolutely burned out, and four months off was enough of a mental recharge for me to sustain the rest of the year, once again feeding from the hand of Corporate America.

I’ve acquired a great deal of new and refocused perspective from Burnout Immunity by Kandi Wiens, EdD. I cannot recommend it strongly enough to everyone reading that is working or pursuing some passion (so, the vast majority of us). I’ve encountered plenty of anxiety lately when reckoning with my life’s trajectory, whether I’m looking back on the last 15 years of work life, dealing with my current role, or thinking about what the future holds. But this bit about career “seasons” really brought me back into the present:

Allow for and normalize varying “seasons” in your career. Over a work life that will likely span decades, it’s okay to emphasize different primary motivations. Sometimes you’ll be mission-driven. Sometimes your job may be strictly transactional; you’re trading your time and energy for money. Sometimes your emphasis will be on skills building and advancement. All of this is okay. There really is a time and season for everything, and it’s healthy to move in and out of mission-driven work—and to move in and out of periods of rest and rejuvenation—as your needs require.

She goes on to call for a “3Rx” prescription of “recover, reconnect, and reimagine”. I managed to do a decent job of the first two on my own last year, so now the real work of re-imagining my future has begun.

This will sound a little strange I bet, but it’s truly a relief to realize that the most stressful time of my life was 15 years ago at this point, when my parents died. I have never experienced a more unstable time in my life than in that final year of high school, and with a lucky combination of mental resilience and an amazing supporting cast, I found my way here to relative stability and comfort. But there are still so many injustices to fix in this world outside of our personal circumstances, and we must all be better about caring for one another…so the re-imagining continues as I search for the ways I’m supposed to make the world around me a little better.

Here’s the proclamation: my 2025 accountability checklist, on the Internet for all to judge for eternity. Let’s see how it holds up. (I reserve the right to add to the list later.)

Guiding principle: live in the present.

• Stop getting bogged down by productivity systems…simply do things.
• Advocate more for the causes that line up with my personal values (taking care of our only planet Earth, healthcare as a human right, funding our infrastructure that we all use and need).
• Quit more toxic, billionaire-owned tech. No social media is going to save us. We don’t need any more evidence of how draining it is on our society. Every second we spend hating each other is a win for exactly one group of people (💰), and a distraction from the aforementioned causes I care about.
• Connect with people directly (preferably IRL), and support (or contribute to?) non-profit tech, organizers, and artists.
• Spend more time with my partner and the cats each day.
• Fetch pays the bills, so make the most of it.
• Don’t forget to exercise, and lay off the sugar (you’re mid-30s now dude, the AnnuityDew era is over).

What we do in the name of our corporations won’t mean anything in the end. What we do purely for the benefit of each other is what will sustain humanity.