New Years Resolutions 2013

It's that time of year again! I must say my 2012 resolutions worked out quite okay, for the most part. Except for the one regarding career of course - but that one also "worked out" in its own way - even though it wasn't quite what I was expecting.

December has been a bit of a slow month - sort of a hangover of a rather weird and disjointed year - 2012 has seen plenty of strange epiphanies, both professional and personal.

The best part of 2012 has been that I think I'm finally grasping impermanence and flow. Seeing the good in the moment rather than stressing about what's coming next. The shambles that is my career saga of the past two years really helped put some of this into perspective. But feh, no need to get too profound here - let's just get some concrete points out of the way:

Lazy Evening Routine

This is something that has become awfully lazy and unproductive, towards the end of 2012 especially. Most of the time I just eat dinner and then watch a couple of movies on DVD until bed time. I thought that not playing WoW any more would mean that I'd have more productive time, but alas, it just got eaten up by finding another lazy comfort zone relaxation routine.

Not sure exactly what to do here, in terms of a solid resolution. It's too trite to say something like "just go out more", or "do something productive instead". So what I will do is ban myself from watching TV and DVDs on weeknights. Only Friday-Sunday, unless it's part of a social plan with someone else. So now, anything else I come up with is bound to be more "productive".

Stop Snacking

To be fair, this is mostly connected to the above. I've gotten in the habit of snacking in front of the TV after dinner. Not necessarily horribly unhealthy stuff - but still not great.

No more snack food except fruit and nuts. Except on weekends.

Career

Ahh, the big one. And this is one that's hard to fully control, because after all, who knows what opportunities might knock (or not). But here's the general plan: 

• I'm getting a truck license as soon as I can find a training session with a driving school during January.
• Look for any kind of transport/trucking work I can find.
• Re-evaluate where to go after that (probably later in the year if not even later).

This all comes back to where I left things hanging in this post. Something in transport is a nice combination of being practical as well as semi-skilled (if not more than semi, depending on further specialisation). My current dream is to see what it's like being a long distance truck driver, and perhaps to get FIFO/location work driving dump trucks in the mines. I know that I have something close to superhuman levels of tolerance for boredom and loneliness, so I know that this aspect won't get to me.

In the meantime, will see how the hours go in my current casual hospitality job. But from the looks of it, there isn't much hope that it'll be a major source of hours and income again. Maybe just for a couple more months through summer. But at any rate, this isn't a huge "occupational" consideration any more.

"Dating"

I wasn't sure if this one is even worth mentioning, since there is nothing I explicitly want on that front anyway. I tried dating fairly explicitly in 2012, and it was mostly a waste of time, though there've been a few "interesting" incidents and I'd met some nice people.

But alas, when you're not looking to "settle down" in any traditional sense, and you have no real interest in sex for its own sake - it's probably best to just go with the flow on this front. I've brought back my OkCupid profile, blanked it out, and changed it to only looking for friends and pen pals. I might fill it out again (in the context of meeting new friends) if I get the inspiration. Otherwise, that part of my life is getting shelved again, for the moment at least. 

Avoid "End Of Year Procrastination"

Lastly, this is something I want to avoid from now on. This year I got into a bit of a lazy mood towards the end of the year. It's not too bad in context I suppose - after all, it really has been an unusually disjointed and weird year - but from now on I want to avoid this. Stay productive and seize the day so to speak.

Meaningless Work

This is mostly a followup to the last post "Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work". I wanted to get it out sooner, but I haven't been feeling too well for the last couple of weeks...

Anyway, in the last post I mentioned how it pays to think about what we can put up with on the job, rather than totally concentrating on finding work that will be meaningful to us. The idea there is that virtually all paid work (anything that isn't truly nearly 100% aligned with one's personal passions) will eventually become a bit of a grind to us - so it's important to be able to "put up" with the particular kind of grind, rather than solely concentrating on finding positives in a potential occupation.

This is nothing radical I suppose. It's just one of the aspects of looking at strengths and weaknesses (and "putting up with an aspect that's generally seen as a negative" is essentially a strength), but I think this often gets glossed over in favour of looking for fulfilment from a job. It seems more positive to think "what will I enjoy?" rather than "what won't drive me nuts?", but I think a balance of the two questions is a good approach.

Meaningless Jobs

My own journey with "meaningless jobs" has been reasonably varied. I've been everything from a paper boy, pizza delivery boy, cleaner (janitor), warehouse hand, kitchen assistant and door-to-door charity collector. All of these jobs had their moments, but of course none were real careers or particularly exciting. However, they did offer a big variety of experiences which - in hindsight - really tested the above theory: the types of boredoms and frustrations in them were radically different.

eg. As a pretty extreme introvert, I have to say that the frustration of dealing with "negative human contact" is particularly draining to me. This is why I couldn't handle face-to-face charity collection, or anything which involved a "hard sell" or dealing with difficult customers. Pizza delivery was actually okay in that regard, because the human contact there is almost always totally positive - you're not trying to sell people something - you're brining them something they're eagerly anticipating.

But to get right to the point - my introversion also means that one of my key strengths in putting up with "meaningless jobs" is simply tolerance for boredom and loneliness. Tasks which many people find extremely lonely and mind-numbing (such as standing in front of an industrial dishwasher and loading dishes into it all evening) are fine for me. I can essentially switch off, go into a kind of meditative stance, and just kill time and go through the motions. It's certainly not always "fun", or something I'd want to do forever, but it's far less taxing than jobs which require constantly being switched on to unpredictable human contact, or needing to sustain focus on something which I'm not really entirely "into".

Conclusion

The conclusion I've come to is that a good approach for me would be to look for work where the main challenge - as far as most people's perception is concerned anyway - is simply tolerance for boredom and loneliness. Finding basic "meaning" is relatively easy. All work is "meaningful", by definition. People wouldn't want it done and wouldn't pay you for it if it didn't mean something to them. But of course this is quite abstract, and can't sustain my motivation if I'm pushing against the grain of my personality (and strengths and weaknesses) with a job long term.

I actually enjoy practical work - as in directly seeing physical objects being created, modified, or moved around. It somehow feels more tangible and meaningful to me than sitting in an office pushing buttons (even though I rationally know that knowledge work is just as "real"). But looking at it from the other side - I find it much easier to put up with the grind of relatively repetitive and lesser skilled practical work than professional knowledge work. 

I have some clearer ideas now regarding what I'll go for in 2013 anyway. I'll leave the specifics out for now, but I'll write more when I actually sign up for it.

Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that causes boredom and frustration at work.

I think there is a lot to be said for Marx's theory of alienation. My own brief description - and interpretation of it for the purposes of this post - is this: "It sucks to work for someone else on something you don't really truly care about, for some external reward which has nothing directly to do with the work (such as money)."

In a twisted way though, I think it's actually quite possible to shoot yourself in the foot by trying to find "meaningful work". My burnout in software development was a classic illustration of this: I loved programming as a hobby and a pure craft, but working for other people on random boring business systems for money slowly ground me down until I simply couldn't take it any more. Essentially, the work was still "alienated labour", despite in theory doing something that I might otherwise enjoy, in a more personally-inspired or hobby context.

Artists report this feeling when doing commissioned works where they are told in detail what to do, as opposed to doing their own thing, or generally being allowed near-complete creative freedom in commissioned work. Obviously, in business this is almost impossible to escape, because the chances of your personal creative passion aligning with business objectives 100% at all times is extremely low in most types of work.

So how to fix this?

I think there is a lot to be said for the idea of treating a job as just a job. This basically acknowledges that it's just some alienated labour that you're doing for money, and you don't get too caught up with any deeper meaning behind it. Boredom, frustration, and eventual burnout are still possible of course - but they can be mitigated by the act of simply finding a comfortable flow without expecting any kind of existential fulfilment from the whole thing.

After a decade in a "meaningful career", versus years of odd casual jobs (including my current gig as a KP), what I've found is that 1) It's actually much easier for me to treat menial work as "just a job" and tolerate it on that level, and 2) Everybody has strengths and weaknesses which make certain "menial jobs" vastly more tolerable than others, even if they're not very "meaningful" to us.

For me, the key to occupational sanity seems to be almost the exact opposite of "finding meaningful work". That is: finding work which is so meaningless that I can tolerate it simply by not expecting anything at all from it other than going in, grinding out the time, and being paid for it. The less "engagement", the better. Well, that's the theory anyway!

In practice, it's more of a balance of course. Focusing on the "positives" of jobs can sometimes lead us astray. Often it's just as important to ask - "Which types of 'negatives' would I be good at tolerating?", which, granted, is really just another "strength" and a positive - but many people don't like to talk like that. And every job interview advice source tells you to speak in positives and avoid drawing attention to negatives, which I think in this case tends to feed back into people's evaluation of occupation choice and glosses over something that's actually quite important.

I'll write a follow-up to this soon, but for now, this describes the general abstract idea of how I'm looking to tackle this issue.

"Downshifting" interview

I was interviewed by a sociology professor at RMIT yesterday. It's for an upcoming book about people who leave the corporate rat race and do something "alternative" with their lives - generally in the sense of less conventionally "successful".

It was an interesting experience. I told her upfront that it would be better if she asks me specific questions than if I try to just tell the story, because that would lead to some serious rambling. In the end, it was exactly as I expected - many threads of thought tying together to give a fairly decent picture of what happened, albeit all quite disorganised and general.

One thing I realised was that - unlike certain other people who leave the corporate rat race to become starving artists or photographers or whatever - I didn't do it to follow any specific creative "passion". It was more of a push than a pull so to speak. Being pushed out of the corporate grind by burnout, rather than pulled out of it by ideas of concentrating on something else. ie Something more personally meaningful.

Then again, in a sense it could also be said that I simply appreciate going with the flow. Being poor and free rather than a comfortable slave. So on some very abstract, Zen-like level, having all that relatively aimless and "unproductive" time off was a pull force of sorts. The past year has been perhaps the strangest of my life - and I'm starting to think that the aimlessness and emptiness of some of it was necessary. Necessary to create the headspace for all the personal and "occupational" epiphanies that I've had.

In the end, she asked me if I'm overall happier now. It's something I haven't even asked myself directly ever since leaving the corporate world in January 2011. But yes. I am. Absolutely!

Asexy Mind vs Body

I'm having AVEN withdrawal...

The forums have been down for an upgrade for about two days now. I forget how much my morning Internet routine these days revolves around checking up on my AVEN threads and seeing what's new. Oh well, this has at least inspired me to post about something that's been on my mind for a little while - which isn't new at all as a concept on AVEN of course - but it might be interesting to others. That is, the "mind vs body" nature of asexuality.

Mind vs Body

When people first hear about asexuality, the first response from many is to ask something like "...but don't you get horny at all?" - basically implying that there is an obvious and unquestionable link between physiological sexual function and psychological sex drive. To get right to the point: this is basically what stands at the very centre of what asexuality is all about - it's a disconnect between these two things.

(I should note: there are some people who identify as "non-libidoist" and/or their asexuality is reinforced by having a low to non-existent physiological sex drive, but for the purposes of this post I'm focusing on the "libidoist" type - like myself - which appears to be more common anyway.)

In simple words: our lack of interest in partnered sex has nothing to do with any lack of physiological libido, or lack of physical pleasure received from sex - rather, it is a disconnect between that and the psychological desire to bond with other people in a sexual way. Essentially, purely physical sexual function and desire for "partnered sex" are separate things in our minds, and not mentally integrated into an obvious whole like they are for most people.

So how does this work?

The best way to think of it (and this analogy only works if you're gay or straight - it won't work for bisexuals) is that all people look like sexual blank slates to you. Imagine being in an environment where everybody is of the gender that you are not attracted to. Even though you've still got a purely physical libido, it has nowhere to go, there is no one you want to share it with. So even though you might still physically get "horny", you simply shelve the thought of partnered sex.

This is - very roughly speaking - how the world looks to me in sexual terms. I don't see people in an inherently sexual way upfront. "Sexiness" is something that I've learned to see in people in a purely intellectual way, but for the longest time I couldn't understand why people carry on so much about it - it always felt like hype and exaggeration, until I was 33 years old and finally worked out that something is indeed missing from my picture.

All that said, there is another disconnect in the picture here, just to make things even more confusing...

Romantic vs Sexual orientations

I'm a heteroromantic demisexual. When I was a teenager, I started noticing girls (and getting crushes on them) at pretty much the same time as all the other boys did. 

But here's the thing: there was never an immediate sexual follow-up to my crushes. All I ever saw, felt, and fantasised about was wanting to share a vague sense of closeness, love, and affection with them. On a physical level, the most explicit thoughts that would pop into my mind would be the likes of cuddling, kissing, sleeping together (as in literally), and generally being close and affectionate with each other. Sex was always something that sat far in the background - it was never any kind of primary driver or motivator at all.

Fast forward 20 years: this is still where I'm at. 

As you can probably imagine - this was all very easy to conflate with a sense of moralistic sexual conservatism (and I just happened to be involved with girls from conservative cultures which reinforced the feeling that this is "normal"). This is the curse of demisexuality: behaviourally it looks essentially identical to simply being traditionally "moral" about sex, and waiting until you are in a serious relationship. When I was younger, I never gave this much thought, though at times I did indulge this sense a bit (in a morally "elitist" sense). 

Linking the two

For out and out "romantic asexuals", there is no link between love and sex at all. Romantic relationships are ideally sexfree for them, but probably include all the other usual trappings of what's expected from romantic partners.

For demisexuals, and other people towards the grey-asexual end of the spectrum, it's a bit more complicated. Sex can become an important aspect of a romantic relationship (eventually), but it's not a primary driver, or a crucial component. This is the disconnect that makes demisexual dating complicated. As explained above, it's not so much a purely physical lack of sex in the relationship - it's the lack of shared headspace. A lack of shared sense of the importance of partnered sex as a component of romantically connecting with another person.

Demisexual online dating

I pulled down my OkCupid profile yesterday. I'd made some interesting pen pals on there, but after 9 months, I finally realised that it wasn't going to lead anywhere in "dating" terms.

The basic problem with "dating" for me has always been that I fall outside the two major patterns that most people fall into in the modern dating world: those who are looking for casual (sexual) hookups, and those who are looking to settle down and marry.

1) The problem with the first one is obvious - I'm demisexual. So close to asexual that I might as well be asexual. At least at first and for a long time when getting to know a new person. This rules out any kind of casual hookup shenanigans.

2) I'm not actively looking to "settle down". I'm not even sure I want to ever move in and live with someone, let alone get married and have children. This has less to do with being on the asexual spectrum of course - plenty of highly sexual people also don't want these trappings of conventional relationships - but when the two are combined it must have really made some people wonder what the heck I was doing on a dating website.

Learning about being grey-asexual/demisexual has been both an incredibly liberating and an incredibly isolating experience at the same time. On the one hand, it's great to finally connect the dots and understand what's been driving me for these 34 years of existence, and why exactly I fall outside certain psychological patterns that the vast majority of humans seem to take for granted. On the other hand, there is a lot of overlap which is sometimes hard to deal with.

I went on OkCupid early this year with the idea that it should be fine. I knew I was different now, and I thought that this knowledge would help me navigate the dating world better than back when I thought I was "normal" but just vaguely broken somehow. But it's difficult. And the real difficulty isn't sexual or even practical per se - it's purely psychological. When you're driven by a totally different pattern of attraction, you simply give off the wrong signals. People expect a certain level of upfront sexual interest to accompany "romantic" interest, and when you simply don't feel this, you give off the wrong vibe.

Spontaneity and "social laziness"

I really hate surprises. Any kind of surprises. Especially social plans that are sprung on me last-minute...

Last night my parents called me up asking if I want to come over for dinner - this was just after 6pm when I already had food just about to go into the oven - and plans to watch Return Of The Jedi on DVD and have an early night. So technically I had nothing very special "on" last night, but still, I'm not really the sort of spontaneous person who likes sudden changes of plans like that. Even when there are no special plans in the first place.

What's really interesting is that - given enough notice - I'm not a socially lazy person at all. I'll happily make plans to fly to the other end of the country for a casual reunion with old friends in Perth for example. But the key is: these things are planned ahead. I know what's happening weeks or months in advance. It isn't something for which I have to drop everything and rush out the door within 30 minutes when I was expecting to do something else (or even nothing particularly special) that night.

Maybe it's an introvert/INTP thing. I certainly need some level of "mental preparation" when it comes to dealing with people. A sudden assault of any kind of human interaction tends to leave me mentally reeling a bit.

Long story short: I'm not a spontaneous person. I'm actually rather boring. I hate any kind of social surprises. But I don't think that necessarily makes me socially "lazy". Give me enough notice and I'll be up for anything. Don't give me enough notice, and I'll prefer sitting on the couch watching a DVD I've seen a thousand times over suddenly coming out with you.

Welcome

So I've finally decided to start a personal blog...

This has been in the making (in my head at least) for a while, ever since I decided that my old non-anonymous blog was too prone to self-censorship a few weeks ago. Not that I have any incredibly controversial opinions mind you - but there's just something about speaking my mind to the whole world that's slightly uncomfortable for a hopeless introvert like myself.

There's not much of a theme to this. Mostly just personal journal type stuff. But I hope some of it turns out interesting to others.