A long walk to work

Thoughts on a (hopefully) 40+ year career

I am currently 24 years old, with a professional lifespan of ~2.5–3 years , so talking about something spanning 40 years of my life, while I haven’t even lived 25 of my own in the first place, feels a little weird, but what else do you do on a nice lazy Sunday morning? Also out of the 24 years lived, I just remember the ones from around the 16th year, and so I really feel more like 8 year old¹, the first 16 years all seem coalesced into this one giant panorama of blurry snapshots of past memories².

While no one can predict how long a career would last, owing to the unpredictability of both death, and health³ , if all goes well, it would at least be for 40 odd years, if not more, owing to the improvements in healthcare, given that society sets an average retirement age of 60ish?

Even though I can’t really imagine sitting on a beach⁴ somewhere, enjoying my retirement reading books for the rest of my life after that, there would be some element of work, in some form. Given the fact that my ability to create impact would probably be the maximum at that age, given the connections I have hopefully developed by that time⁵, and the free time that old age would provide, should more or less offset the depreciation in productivity that a declining health will lead to.

Thinking about this long journey ahead, actually feels quite relaxing, it takes the pressure off my shoulders to reach certain “milestones” earlier in life, since there is quite a bit of time to do whatever I want to do. It makes it okay to spend a few more months in the city you have come to love⁶, in a job that you don’t love anymore, or spend a bit more time with the people you have come to think of as family, before leaving your nest once again. It makes it okay to take that job that excites you, but doesn’t pay that well. It makes it okay to stay with your family for a bit longer, and put aside the plans for exploring the countries you want to explore for sometime. It makes it okay to spend some more time learning the ropes of your field, to become a student again and pursue your intellectual curiosities a bit more.

Taking this long view, also makes me appreciate the value of the people around me quite a bit. It only makes sense, that other people will have their own 40 year career around me, and will achieve things which are incredibly hard to predict right now. You never know who will become what, or who you’ll get close to, and it just makes it super important to treat everyone well, and also looking back at the brief career I already have had, it was the people who defined the life I was having⁷.

Another important thing to take care of is quite obviously my health. I am already kind of a fitness enthusiast of sorts⁸, but there is a lot in the mental space that needs to be worked upon. It becomes evident on the days when I am sick, or even slightly under the weather, how futile everything else suddenly seems, and all things come to halt, until my body is back to normal, so if this machine needs to be working for 40 more years, it will only do so under proper maintenance and under acceptable workloads, its possible to overclock it a bit at times, but not always⁹.

Also, the work I do will definitely change over time, I will probably not be an IC for 40 years, and my work will not be defined by what I do, but what I enable other people to do¹⁰, and thus its increasingly more important to get better at people skills, not just my technical skills. Also, the field which I work in, which is currently AI, might change, and I might find an alternative career more fulfilling, or just be forced into it due to any number of reasons¹¹, this puts things in perspective, when it sometimes feel like the work I am doing right now, is the only sort of work I’ll be doing forever.

So much for a 40+ year long career, so many things to explore, people to meet, places to be and…

Work to be done.

Tangents

1. My emotional age, might actually be somewhere around that lol
2. This reminds me of the ending of the Death’s end, when SPOILER ALERT, the entirety of humanity is converted from a 3D world, to a 2D image of sorts, only in my case, its like time is flattened into one place for the first score of my life, so it would be more like a 3D cube.
3. Increasingly started to think about health-span, instead of just lifespan after reading David Sinclair’s book Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To
4. Actually, make that a library, my old bod might need the beach sun, but the brain would crave library, OR actually, I’ll take my Kindle equivalent to the beach lol
5. I currently suck at making professional ( or even for that matter personal ) connections, but that will hopefully improve over time, or I’ll shamelessly latch on the connections of the few people I know, similar to how my strategy for making friends as a kind of introvert is to just befriend one very extroverted person lol ( cue to my super extrovert pseudo-sister here )
6. Hyderabad — home, hardest city to leave.
7. There is this view of not making friends at work, I disagree with it, maybe its just yet to be broken naivety, but its impossible for me to not connect with the people I work on a more personal level, when I spend almost the entirety of 5/7 of my days with them
8. Someone recently pointed out, that this is in fact not the case, I am just good at controlling my impulses for junk food and I just like to work out lol
9. Which is a bit hard while working in a rapidly growing startup
10. While I’ll always want to be an IC in some capacity, I do understand that I am not super talented enough to keep growing in that role, and will have to leverage other people’s talents to make up for my own
11. Plain old market forces, or a war, AI automation, hostile AGI takeover, something like the cultural revolution in China, climate change, health, family commitments, aliens, super-intelligent animal takeover, or <INSERT FAVORITE POST APOCYLPITIC TROPE>