Why Am I Always So Tired?

Today was supposed to be the start of my three-day working-on-the-house vacation, and it was supposed to conclude with being tired from a long day of great accomplishments.

But it actually began with being tired, and it wasn't the tired that comes from getting back from a long road trip; it was the tired that comes from not wanting to get up and face the world.

This is what happens when the world takes away from you the joy of doing what you want to do.

I really like living here in this part of the country. I enjoy the short commute, the nice neighborhoods, the ease in getting from the suburbs to the city, the laid-back style of life. I do not wish to return to the long commutes, the road-rage stress, the constant fear of layoffs.

But I am not entrepreneurial. I do not want to "sell myself". It is not in my nature. My nature is to sit and contemplate, to write, to create, to ponder for long periods of time about little things that might or might not mean anything to anyone, to scratch it all out because it doesn't sound right, and then do it all over again - only a little bit different, until the form and rhythm are correct.

I can't do that anymore, not here, not as an engineer.

The Company, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that Americans are too expensive to utilize as engineers (creators, designers, testers) because those "assembly-line" tasks can be performed at far less cost by people in Third World countries. So they have declared - and acted upon - their intentions to rid their American workforce of those occupations by instituting layoffs. My escape from this first round was purely by coincidence; I had accepted a leadership position as a favor to a friend, and thus became the lowest rung on the ladder which was not cut off.

This is not to say that my turn will not come. As soon as the current project is completed, in six or seven or eight months, perhaps it will be my turn, and (assuming they do things the same way it was done this time) I will receive a phone call to let me know that my services are no longer required.

(In this industry, it hasn't been the first time; and unfortunately, in all probability it will not be the last.)

What is most upsetting, is that they are taking away from us engineers that which gives us meaning in our professional lives. Writing code and creating electronics circuits is why we got into the business in the first place. We did not begin our careers so that we could sit in meetings all day long and generate status charts and handle charge accounts and give presentations to customers.

We want to create things. Good things. Things that other people will find valuable, of course, but mostly things that we find valuable because we designed them, we created them. To take all that away is to cheapen our lives, despoil our achievements, reduce our significance to less than nothing.

This is not to say that there will be no job; there will always be jobs available, so long as there are things that need to be done. But there will be far less joy and satisfaction in those jobs, far less fulfillment, far less creativity.

And there will be more tired mornings.