One thing I've said in past posts is: you don't play games you can't win, and I stand by that. It's odd, then that I have been breaking it for the past few months, looking for a job in IT. I love computers and technology. It's an interest of mine and has been for some years now. I even enjoyed my last IT job. Thoroughly. However, corporate America is a game I have no mind nor stomach for. At heart, I am an academic and a practical man. There's no room for people like me in an environment in which you are told to follow and fit in.
Of course, some would say that such an attitude is impractical, and it is that notion that lies at the heart of the title of this post, because in these interviews with these small men and women who sit and contemplate the bottom line and view me and presumably all their candidates in this way, I can only think one thing: I am better than that person.
You can't enter an interview with that mindset, for so many reasons, but I do, because I can't help it. Every time I'm asked what my strengths and weaknesses are or where I see myself in five years, I think to myself: "but you wouldn't make it."
What I mean by this is that if we were in a life or death situation, I am better equipped to deal with it than they are. I'm not saying I'm well equipped, or that I'd make it either, but there's a question there, and a possibility. I have taught myself to drive fast, run fast, shoot well. I can prepare my own food and drink. I exercise and eat well. I take care of my body and my mind. Maybe none of that matters in their world, but it does in mine, and mine is the only one that matters, because in my world you live or die by your own merits. So when I try to work under the assumption that a corporate interviewer may be controlling my livelihood in the future, my mind discards that notion as absurd and laughable.
I don't want to put myself out as something I'm not here. I'm no soldier. In an emergency, I'm not sure I'd survive. But I am sure that your average white collar worker wouldn't because they don't have the mind for it. I once wrote an article on why I love the shooting sports. Besides being straight up fun, shooting is pure. You hit the target or you don't. What enters into it isn't how nice a guy you are or if you can make people laugh, whether you can make a sale or how fast you can close a call. What enters into it is your rifle, your technique, and your skill. You put a round on target or you don't. And in a situation where you're called to shoot more than paper, that skill can mean your life. Hit or miss. Live or die. It's a fundamental equation and it's binary and final. That's the way my mind works. That's the practicality I'm talking about.
Does that sound insane? Perhaps, but you have to ask yourself why it's becoming increasingly popular to make your own stuff, and why guns and survival gear sales are surging, why primitivism is back in vogue. This isn't the 1950s where every American house yearns to have a refrigerator, an electric stove, and a smiling, obedient, and thoroughly boring bleach-blond stay-at-home mom in the kitchen. Our manufactured goods are a product of mass production and slavery, and people want an escape from that reality to a truer reality. Making something yourself or learning survival skills are actions which speak to the same root, and that root is the desire to create something relevant to you. If I buy a beer off the shelf, it wasn't made by me for me. I had no control, and no matter how good that beer tastes (and there are some great craft beers out there) it will never taste as good as the one you made yourself, even if the one you made yourself isn't particularly good. In a world where people feel lost, and as if their lives lie in the hands of the state, the corporations, or some other entity, making your own goods or learning to live in the woods is a mark of personal rebellion and rejection of a system which is, by its nature, synthetic.
Still think I'm crazy? What I'm saying isn't new. It was a major tenet in another industrial society: 19th century America. If you think this movement is new, read more Thoreau.
Which brings me back to my original point: applying to IT jobs is, for me, playing a game I can't win. There is no room in a job based on reaction for a fundamentally creative person. I don't react. I create the scenario in the first place. In academia, you live or die on the novelty of your ideas. Certainly your work is based on those who came before you, in more ways than one, but the way in which you interpret history must be new in some way, must be creative, in order to be compelling.
But more importantly, I think, it must be meaningful. It has been my goal for some years to help solve existing racial problems (and if you think that doesn't apply anymore, there's a plane ticket to Missouri I'd like to buy you) by upholding the memory of over four million enslaved men and women. It has been the goal of many of my friends and brothers (both literal and metaphorical) to attempt projects just as meaningful as mine. This is the world in which I live, and when I compare it to solving CEO Johnson's wireless problem again, I laugh, because I see no reality in a world in which CEO Johnson or his wireless problem exist. They are small and feeble and I have more important things to do.
There is no denying what big business has done for this country, for better or for worse. But I can't make it matter to me. That's my bottom line. My strengths are many, my "weakness:" my inability to accept the importance of that which does not matter. Where do I see myself in five years? Not stagnating. Not sitting in an office chair wishing I'd done it differently. Not working for a paycheck, but for a future installment on the future of humanity. I see myself existing.
