The difference between what you can do and what you want to do

I know it’s been a while since I last posted. A lot has happened since then. Maybe I’ll give an update about it all at some point … maybe not. I know I was in the middle of a series of posts that were supposed to explain some newfound mindset and framework for thinking and for my life. My friend Jesse, after I explained it all too him over a few pints, suggested I write a book about it. Maybe I’ll do that too. I’ll be done school soon … maybe that will be a new project to take on. How’s this for a title: “The Dehumidifier: How I Went From Loving Star Wars to Star Trek”? Sounds pretty sweet right? Actually, after seeing it written out, I kind of like it. Anywho, today’s post will be something off the topic path I had created in earlier posts.

I am coming to the end of my master’s degree. It looks like July 14th will probably be my defense date. After that day, I’ll probably have to write up a few papers for publication and then I’ll be done with it, at which point I’ll have to move on to something new. This is presenting a problem. I don’t really know what to do. I kind of hate what I’m doing now, and I know that I don’t want to keep doing it but I don’t know what I want to do.

This problem stems from the fact that I’ve been pretty lazy in terms of trying to figure out what I want to do and trying to plan for that eventual future. I kind of assumed I would fall into something that I loved, thereby allowing the fates to decide for me. The problem is, however, that the fates have yet to decide for me. They’re pricks like that … only showing up when it’s convenient for them.

Another problem is that up until this point, I’d failed to make the distinction between what I can do and what I want to do. When I was in undergrad and when I was deciding on a master’s program, I never asked myself if what I was doing was what I really wanted to do. It was stuff that I knew I could do, and so I did it, assuming that being able to do it would also translate into liking it. For example, my master’s is on death feigning in flour beetles, and for my project I had to do a lot of poking beetles with forceps to get them to play dead. When I took the project on, I thought that death feigning sounded cool and that I would be able to tap beetles, therefore, this was a project I would enjoy. I was wrong. I’m not saying it was necessarily the wrong decision … I did learn quite a bit, and it did spark this revelation, which could be really helpful in the future. It was probably just a bad decision (is there a difference between the two?).

A third problem is that I have a very superficial idea of what it involves and what you can expect to get out of other jobs. For example, I talk a lot about maybe wanting to do something involving outer space. The problem is that when I envision working on space projects, it usually involves fantasies of lasers and super artificial intelligence and cool machines (that I just know how to use because I do) and montage scenes if building stuff… kind of a cross between Iron Man and From the Earth to the Moon. I usually don’t take into account all the struggles and boredom and failed experiments and failures to get funding and having to compete with other people from jobs and the fact that the space budgets are super small compared to what needs to be done. Nor do I take into account the education required to work in the industry and the fact that I’m not sure if I could handle the math and physics required for an engineering degree, let alone if I could even handle doing another undergrad degree.

Furthermore, I tend to have so many ideas and be superficially interested in so many things, that it would be impossible to try every job that I might be interested in or work on every project I come up with. It requires some decisive action and intense research … two things that I am either not ready to do or not currently able to do. So, as the clock ticks down, I’m excited to be finishing my master’s, if for no other reason than I’m tired of doing it. As to what awaits after, who knows. It’ll be a laugh finding out though.