The chance of unemployment

After more than eight years my journey with 7bridges has come to an end, but I don’t intend to dwell on 7bridges’s shortcomings. What is left of it will soon cease to be of any concern of mine anyway.

Instead, I’d like to take this opportunity to sit back and think about what I really want to do now. Anyone visiting this corner of the web with some sort of regularity has noticed what happened to its contents. It’s been a while since I wrote about anything IT-related and that’s because lately I’ve been finding everything IT-related to be troublesome. Simply put, IT is just not what I hoped it would be.¹

This is not to say that I’m not interested in IT anymore. IT plays a crucial role in my activism and I often find myself discussing secure and more privacy-aware solutions with comrades coming from different backgrounds.

Yet the combination of activism and my BA in philosophy has led me to a peculiar position. That is, I enjoy working with people to a degree I’ve never thought possible before. I’ve discovered the pleasure of just being there for like-minded people and the rewards when I help people to get whatever they’re trying to get.

It may sound silly and naive, I know, but to someone like me, so used to sitting at a desk typing away lines of code, proper human interaction has never been a given. Note that I’m not blaming remote work for this. Out of almost twenty years spent in the IT business, remote work amounts to only a fifth of that time.

The truth is small talk is not proper human interaction for me. It can be nice, sure, but it can also be deeply boring. Most of the times it feels like everyone has to do it so we end up chatting about the same things over and over again. Maybe this is why I’ve rarely connected with colleagues on a personal level, but I’m not pointing my finger at them. It’s just me needing a different sort of people around.

I want to look at my current unemployed status as an opportunity to find myself again and move towards paths closer to what I really am. I can afford to spend some time with me instead of giving it to the next employer. Let’s treasure this privilege for once.