Challenges

Apparently, I need challenges to get moving and stay on track. The last few years of non-blogging makes this even more clear. The main reason I started writing up my mind on paper mostly had to do with trying to get out of debt and my personal journey intertwined with that.

I did an attempt to comeback last year, just before my most recent job change back then, and then I got into a work-hate-how-to-fire-how-to-make-more-how-to-get-out-of-this-grind kind of mode. It was a bit disturbing. I went on job interviews and got several offers and took none. I guess it's a lot like what happened back in '17 when I went on buying Apple stuff, lol.

This took some time to sink in (well, actually, it's a in-progress to be honest). What's interesting is that I took my current job as a software dev at my previous-previous-previous employer because of... well, moneys. When starting out there, one of my colleagues was in his last months before leaving as a pensionada, just a couple of years before his official pension age. He was sick and tired of work.

Two of my other colleagues are reaching pension age quite soon, they even see me as a possible future replacement for one of them being more of the tech-lead. And of course it's all laugh and joke about me and another younger colleague having to work for, well... 30 years which feels like forever or something.

Of course I'm working on a completely different plan here, but for some reason it got a bit under my skin. I felt trapped. Trapped in my job, trapped in my field, trapped in my living situation (still a lat-relationship part-time living in my community). And, being a software developer I constantly feel the urge to have-to-deliver and being found out as an impostor. Even though there's absolutely zero pressure on any work anywhere.

That got me into the job interviewing phase. Since my SO lives a bit further from my city I started looking for different jobs in different fields (both dev and mechanical engineering again), aiming for high pay. Fun part is the best offer was an internal job opening which I didn't take because it was back to mechanical having to work together with my previous manager and for some reason I got scared shitless about leaving IT. That happened once more in an external job opening closer to my SO. And I even landed a pretty intense job after an interview I felt I f#cked-up but they were still interested. But then I chickened out because it was impossible to work from home.

So, doubts. And randomly applying to jobs. Just like randomly buying stuff. I guess... I really felt lost again :-)

In the end I made a wise decision (I think...) to just stay with my current company for a while. And then something interesting happened. I found out my colleagues are on a different pay-grade then me. Being, a scale higher. Which left me confused because when I applied it was made clear to me this is a scale 10 job. That got me some sort of instantly-demotivated.

I made a point of this during my yearly review and guess what... it was a no-brainer for my current manager, they are super happy with me in the team and really want me to stay so as of november I will be promoted into the higher scale. Wtf? So last year around this time I was looking at jobs that would make more and now my current job will make more. And in the mean time it kind of feels like a slacker-job since there still is no pressure at all (even though that's not really helping my impostor-syndrome in any way).

I'm slowly getting back on track financially, I'll do an update in a later post on that. What's also interesting is that I'm back at the gym. It's been 10 years (whoops) and I've so much underestimated how much I need some form of exercise. I'm only going for three weeks, but I already feel how it's having an impact on my sleep and generally on my well-being. The gym owner is a nice dude and he's noticing that I like a bit of a challenge, which got me talking to my SO (who's also starting out at the gym again) where it became clear that I really need challenges or something competitive (even if it's just a competition with myself) to get going and staying in motion. Because if there's no real challenge going on, I go into some sort of vegetative mode just scrolling on my phone and browsing the interwebs and going nowhere.

Now I feel like I need a couple more small challenges financially and personally to get back on track and work closer towards a life-style that makes me generally more happy. Because this damned depressive state keeps haunting me and if just starting to work out has this massive effect, imagine what other small changes I can make that can have major impact on my life!

One of them begin just jotting down whatever is happening (or not happening) here again. Let's start out with monthly updates and we'll see from there!