Adrian Unger (Info.)

I'm something like 3 years now on my Sabbatical. Which, of course, is an extremely privileged place to be and I am filled with gratitude. At the same time, I really need to start getting clear on what I want to do for money. So, it's time to reflect on why I quit in the first place.

There's no denying I had a natural affinity for computers. As a child, I recall playing on my dad's old suitcase computer, literally just opening the word processor or calculator and pretending to do "computery" things.

Later, when my dad had a Windows 3.x machine, I would play hours of SkiFree and Treasure Mountain. Even when I had access to a Windows 95 computer and Internet access was still fickle, I would explore every nook and cranny of the folders, menus and applications installed, customizing whatever I could.

When it came to computer class in school, I seemed to have a natural talent at learning the applications and finding ways to do things that weren't immediately obvious. Despite countless hours drawing as a kid, I never really moved beyond stick figures and basic shapes. With computers, it was second-nature. I loved exploring what was possible. Even to the point of learning how to use Hex Editors to manipulate compiled programs like Minesweeper and Pinball to change the speed, or rewrite my high score.

One pivotal summer, my affinity for computers was cemented. My dad and step-mom had moved to the states. I was going to go out and visit on my own, since my brother wanted stay home and be with friends. When I arrived I was armed only with my skateboard. Unfortunately, 90 degrees and 100% humidity meant I could barely last more than an hour skating in a nearby school parking lot.

There was a TV with some DVDs but no cable yet—they had literally just moved in. I didn't bring any video game systems and really wasn't into reading books. There was a computer I could use, but no internet hooked up yet. I brought my copy of Half-Life and the computer had Photoshop as my step-mom was an avid photographer.

I spent hours messing around in Photoshop and, since I'd already beaten Half-Life, hours messing around in the filesystem to see what I could change or break. Eventually, when the internet was hooked up, I rushed to search for how I could change, break, or "hack" the game even more, learning about scripting and hacking and getting a very rough understanding of computer programming through messing around with the OpenGL and C++ code.

Once the internet was essentially a permanent fixture in my life, I became enamored with all of the cool websites I'd find when searching for how to do things in Photoshop, or how to hack Half-Life (and later Counter-Strike), or trick-tips for skateboarding. I created my first website with Geocities and just kept creating more. I wanted my own functionality, eventually stumbling on PHP. I learned through the wonderful tizag.com.

And, this just kept spiraling. I continued teaching myself Photoshop and programming. I continued making websites. I made designs and graphics in Photoshop. I designed websites for Counter-Strike clans and forum signatures for various forums focused on skateboarding, hacking, or video games. In the beginning I was just excited to make things for other people. I think I ended up making something like 3 websites for various gaming clans.

Eventually, I got my first paying client, a one-man hosting provider/reseller (bah, I can almost see the logo I designed... it definitely incorporated the DNA double-helix...). I had no contract and no agreed upon milestones. I ended up making a handful of different logos and web designs with countless iterations. The requests for more changes and more work were endless to the point I had to walk away. I think I got paid like $200 out of the agreed upon $500-$1000 (memory is fuzzy on the exacts). Anyway, it was fast-track to learning most of the freelancing "dont's.""

This is a really long, self-indulgent way to say that curiosity and tinkering had driven me towards web design and development from a rather young age. Combined with that, I have a strong preference for simplicity. I loved solving problems for clients in simple, easy to maintain ways. I loved making new things, not getting things I already built to work again. Yet, I also loved fixing really broken things or replacing sluggish, error-prone software with simple, elegant and efficient solutions. Curiosity and practicality, that's what drove me.

I mean, isn't that the whole point of computers? To do things efficiently? And, as much as I had a curiosity with technology, I seem to have reached my limit or end. I am not endlessly curious about technology. I don't care to learn how to do the same thing in a new language or a new way, unless there is an obvious, ideally measurable, benefit.

Yet, in the last years of my 17 year career, it just felt like there was this endless loop of redoing things in slightly different ways where the technology became the solution or goal itself, rather than the actual purpose or function it was meant to fill. I even remember the project that was a real turning point for me.

It was an internal website for managing image assets for a large company. This way, different marketing departments could have access to brand images and stock photos and so on, to use in ads or videos or customer-facing websites or whatever. So, essentially and image gallery with uploads and tagging and searching and maybe some rudimentary permissions. In other words: A SOLVED PROBLEM. But, of course, this internal website that would NEVER scale to public-facing levels of traffic had to have a custom back-end written in some hip language that compiled to the Erlang virtual machine and the front-end had to be the (at that time, maybe brand-new?) React framework.

And, of course, everything was essentially written from scratch. For an IMAGE GALLERY WITH UPLOAD FUNCTIONALITY. Goodness.

But, everyone else loved it. They loved learning the new languages and tools. They loved writing (again?!) file uploaders from scratch. Thus, this is when I first starting thinking, "Am I not suited to keep being a web developer?"

Why would I want to find a new way to program a file-upload? I suppose, the other developers hoped to one day work at Google or Facebook or whatever and they would actually need a novel way to implement file uploads because you'd have millions of people doing it at once. But, hitting that sort of scale didn't seem to interest me.

Then I remembered something someone said to me at my first programming job at an Ad Agency. They were on the "creative coding" side, meaning they would make mini-games and microsites with things like interactive Zen sand gardens, whereas I was a Jr. Web Developer. They said, "You better learn creative coding, otherwise you'll just be re-implementing CRUD for the rest of your career." Of course, the import of that statement didn't hit me till years later when I was writing the fanciest image uploader of all time.

My last stint as a web-developer was at an amazing Ecommerce company. Literally, one of the best places I could imagine to work. Yet, I failed to manage my energy as the company grew and eventually burned out—hence the sabbatical.

And now, I feel so torn. I loved my career. It was, overall, a blast! I got to work with incredible people and constantly learn and build cool things. But, I just have no desire to chase the seemingly endless iterations and looping that come with a career in technology. I suppose I could niche down and stick to more stable technologies and focuses... But, I guess I just don't have the same curiosity and wonder that originally guided my career. Is this what getting old is? Is this the mid-life crisis? How long does it take to reset and reframe? I've been on sabbatical for like three years now!

AI just seems to exacerbate my tiredness towards technology. It seems to be making the web less personal rather than more. Which, though I've yet to mention, was a huge draw early on. I have made so many personal connections through the web. Getting early clients because I shared photos on Flickr, or interacted on sites like NTMY.org. More than anything, I wonder if I'm just burnt out on Capitalism. I'm by no means anti-capitalist, but everything has it's limit and we seem to have hit a critical threshold of growth beyond the physical limits of reality and the actual planet that sustains us. Honestly, it looks like much of society has gone mad—but, maybe it's always been mad?

I dunno, this whole mid-life crisis, burn-out, I don't know what I'm doing with my life situation has been much more interesting to me than programming or the web or technology. I find it exciting diving into my own psyche, starting with zero prior knowledge of the domain, to figure out what the hell is going on. Maybe this will lead somewhere? Who knows.