Quarterlife-crisis

Where you choose to live is not something that can be underestimated. No matter how important a job or a career might be, once 5pm rolls around and you go home for the day you still have to live there. I’m not sure to what extent citizens are influenced by a city’s character or vice versa. It might be that the sidewalks roll up at night in some places because people prefer to spend their evenings at home, or maybe people prefer to spend their evenings at home only because there’s nothing else to do.

There’s no doubt that a city’s character and attitude can affect your perception of the place. Paul Graham describes this concept acutely in his essay on Cities and Ambition:

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

His point is that if you know exactly what you want to do, you should go live in the place where that sort of thing is being done. You should surround yourself with people who are doing that sort of thing. For example, if you wanted to pursue music then you should probably go live in Nashville, which is literally off-the-charts compared to other cities’ music scenes. Whether the people are influenced by the city or whether it’s the other way around is irrelevant when you think of the fact the people there are still providing much of the influence. The fact is that in doing what you want will come more easily if the people around you want to be doing the same thing, too. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. To quote again from Paul Graham’s essay:

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

Although the essay emphasizes the work and career aspects of the city you live in, I think we also need to consider the lifestyle and social aspects.

I do believe the the key is to find a balance between an interesting work life as well as fulfilling social life. I’ve been going to extremes on both ends of the spectrum, so it’s no wonder I’m so far unsatisfied. I started my career at IBM’s Ottawa lab working on the garbage collector for the Java Virtual Machine. It was a very, very cool job. I got to work on some pretty exciting things and dive head first into the low-level inner workings of the VM. I was dealing with complex problems that I’d only read about in textbooks and I loved it. Yet I found that the city’s attitudes and subtle messages were running against the grain of my personality. The underlying message in Ottawa that permeates the very fabric of the city is: “Settle down.”

And I was not ready to settle down. I had just graduated, I felt like I had an infinite sea of options ahead of me and I could do anything I want. The last thing I would want to do is “settle.”

My social life went from its peak in university to a dead stop as soon as the moving truck left with my belongings in it. It was like hitting a brick wall while traveling at 200mph, without anti-lock breaks or airbags. There were several factors that contributed to the social vacuum I experienced, but I think that ultimately the root cause was that I moved prematurely. I still had unfinished business to deal with in my hometown, and I was not mentally prepared to say goodbye and move on. I probably would’ve been unhappy no matter where I ended up. Having said that, I’m still not ready to settle — least of all in Ottawa.

When I moved back to Montreal, I jumped from extreme on the work/life spectrum to the other. Although I was asked if I would be interested in keeping my job on the VM team while working remotely out of Montreal, I declined because I didn’t like the idea of being isolated from my teammates. Instead I switched teams to the only software team that operates in Montreal, which is a very different kind of team from the one I had in Ottawa. My social life has indeed improved since I’ve returned, but I am regretting the decision I took to switch teams.

I have not, for even a second, regretted the decision to move back to Montreal. This city’s message is much more in tune with who I am. Montreal’s underlying philosophy is “Enjoy life.” You can feel it in the pulse of the city’s streets. This city is alive and its character is emphasized everywhere you go. Not a day goes by where I don’t think to myself, at least once, “I fucking love this city.”

Despite the city, my social life is beginning to experience its natural decline and tapering off as I get older and more disconnected from the life I had as a university student. This gradual sense of slowing down is exactly what I need now, even though it’s been causing me no small amount of anxiety. It’s important for my personal growth to learn to deal with this very natural part of growing up. This is what my brain knows, anyway. My heart is still not willing to give it up.

The experience of my move to Ottawa is still tugging at the back of my head. I wish I had never gone so that I could experience this gradual decline at a more appropriate pace. Instead of hitting the brick wall at 200mph, it might have been more bearable if I were going 50mph or if I’d have had time to install airbags.

One thing I learned from the experience is that I have to be more careful when choosing a place to live. Many people have told me that Ottawa is unique in quite how boring it really is, and that this is only something you can really know once you live there. I learned that I need to spend enough time in a city to be able to hear its subtle messages before I decide to lay down roots there. I’m hoping this learned caution is a good thing, and if I do decide to move somewhere else I’ll be better prepared.

There’s a problem in our culture and in our language that causes us to infer identify based on our occupation. We say “I am a software developer”, “I am an engineer”, “I am a marketing rep” and “I am a student”. We use these statements to build up our identities. When meeting someone for the first time, they almost inevitably asked what’s called The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: “What do you do?” They almost never ask “Who are you?”. And what happens when someone actually does ask “Who are you?” … Well, you’ll most likely start with your name immediately followed by your occupation.

This is so freaking wrong. But we can’t help it. It’s imbued in our culture. It’s as if you really are only a reflection of your job. And what if your job doesn’t make you happy? What if it’s something you do to pay the bills and to fund the rest of your life? Well then you might not very much like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question.

“If you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.”¹

Throughout my university years I identified with being an engineering student. I embodied that identity in every way I could. I attended every conference and competition available to me. I became involved in my university’s undergraduate Engineering student association. I’ve even won awards for “outstanding contribution to student life”. If you asked me who I was, I would proudly answer “I am a student in software engineering at Concordia University.”

Then, I graduated. Suddenly I was no longer a student. The conferences and competitions were no longer open to me. CUSEC 2009 was my last, big student event that I could participate in. It’s as if the persona and identify that I had embodied with all my spirit was all at once out of context. I suddenly didn’t know who I was anymore. I wasn’t the long-haired, lovably drunk software engineering student anymore, though I was still a long-haired lovable drunk. But that answer didn’t satisfy me at all.

I found myself questioning my identity. How much of who I am was really me, and how much of it was a subconscious attempt to embody the identity and image of a “software engineering student”? Naturally part of the problem is that I had trouble identifying with my new role as a “professional” software developer at a big company. Answering The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question with “I am a software developer” just doesn’t jive with me. I don’t feel that it accurately portrays who I am the way saying I’m a student did. In other words, I work as a software developer, but there is much more to me than that.

I don’t like my answer to The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question. As I mentioned, I feel that there is much more to me than my job, but extending this interpretation reveals that my job doesn’t give me enough room to express my own identity. This is why I’m not satisfied simply saying “I am a software developer”, because that is but one small facet of who I am. There are many more aspects to my personality that are hidden, looking for a venue or an outlet with which to be expressed.

I was incredibly lucky to have found outlets for all aspects of myself in my identity as a student, and now I’m struggling to find new outlets in a different context as a member of the working world. I need to change, and recognizing that was not easy. So as a symbol and a tangible reminder of the fact that I’m no longer a student, I finally got a haircut and shed the curly ponytail that I’d kept since the 8th grade.