2023.12.17
It should be some interesting times and good filler in my CV for this period, but it's not providing a livable wage. (Would be like an ideal role for quasi-retirement, but I'm not stocked up for that yet, for sure) Since it's just teaching in the evening, I will be able to keep up my search for a real programming gig, and even take a fulltime role on as long as it has a modicum of time flexibility.
But It will be a sacrifice because I won't be able to attend band practices for a bit, unless we find some kind of time and space workaround for my group.
Which brings me to this Atlantic article
The Joy of Underperforming (gift link, so you should be able to read it). It's about thinking in terms of "seasons". "This Too Shall Pass" stuff.
(In a random email my comic artist collaborator James Harvey wrote "Sorry you're unemployed at the moment. It will get better soon!" - a sentiment not grounded in much save a general, somewhat optimistic knowledge that most conditions are fleeting, but somehow still is heartening.)
The article digs into letting some things go (at least temporarily) during such times, so seeing how that kind of foretold my course with my band there hit home - especially since band has been one of the consistently nurturing and joyous and reassuring things for me during this whole time.
Like I mean this could be mostly "just" a tough season, the big wheel of fiscal fate turning with me at the bottom in a way it hasn't save 2001 and 2008.... the recession-resisting low interest rate cheap money made quarantine a boom time in tech that I was barely aware of, and now there's this MASSIVE hangover - but largely industry specific. If you're on the outside looking in you're joined by legions of smart eager folks. (And it certainly raises any imposter syndrome that might be murmuring in your ear to shouting levels.) Plus so many companies are trepidatious with a middling general economic outlook, and with a kind of fad among CEOs trying to look smart by cutting cutting cutting.
So the events could also have aspects of a climate shift - maybe AI and 2020's sudden jolt (demonstrating the potential "remote"-ability of a lot of tech jobs) is a seachange. But there could still be a sense of seasons within that - like even ice ages had their summers, just like our heating up planet has its winters.
In any case Melissa and I are not in dire straits. I'm at Plan D or E and can probably go pretty far down the alphabet before radical life changes are mandated, though I think I've lost some of my rosier retirement hopes I was hearing 5 years ago. But any season shift can't happen soon enough for my liking...
