Do You Know, Where You're Going To

I have written this post once before, and the computer ate it. :-( It was all about people with Career Goals and Three Year Plans and all that rot, because I was buttonholed by one last night, when I went out drinking with work colleagues. (Why is it these people always work in things like "Corporate Finance" and love Three Letter Acronyms and throwing jargon around?)

His metaphor for his Three Year Plan was that of the Great Circle - i.e. "If you want to get somewhere on a plane, you have to take a circuit which doesn't look like a straight line on a map!" He repeated this like it was some kind of Great Truth, when really I suppose it was meant as a metaphor for lateral thinking, even though he probably wouldn't recognise Lateral Thinking if it bit him on his Back End Implementation. I liked the metaphor, because, well, I like anything to do with maps. But the amusing thing is that it says more about the problems of Euclidian geometry in translating the topography of a sphere to a two dimensional surface than about "career trajectories" or whatever. There *is* no such thing as a straight line on a globe. It's an illusion created by the limitations of the human mind.

And then he started on about how "Everybody has a goal! Or at least, everybody knows what it is that will make them happy!" Rather than call bullshit on this, I simply told him, "well, I must be in your tiny minority, because I've not got a clue."

I really don't have a clue about where I want to be in three years. And I've given up on the idea that any thing will just... MAKE me happy. I've never put any particular planning into my "career" - it's just something I've kind of drifted into, paying the bills to keep me alive for other interests. I have vague fantasies and dreams ("If we don't believe in fantasy, we are lost" - Circulus) but Goals?

Funnily enough, I feel happiest (or, rather, more content, less stressed or pressured) when I *don't* have some kind of grand Goal. The times I've had a grand Goal, I've either driven myself crazy in the single-minded pursuit of it, to the exclusion of enjoyment of anything else in my life - or else I've experienced a sense of crushing disappointment when I achieve that goal, and realise that no, it hasn't made me happy, it hasn't made my life perfect, and it's not really changed anything.