Getting Older or Getting Comfortable

I know it has been a while since I posted anything here, but today of all days feels like the perfect one to make a leap back into the online world and share some deep musings I've been having about software development, life, and human motivation.


I wrote some time ago about the idealism of youth and the way we all leave college (or at least did when I graduated).  I find myself having difficulties with both motivation and concentration.  I don't know if this is something that happens as you get older, but I feel like it is something more sinister or at least alarming.

We as people fight against two fundamental forces.  We have a drive to learn, explore, and interact with our environments, but we also have a deep, evolutionary important drive to resist difficulty and strife.  Both of these traits have fueled human evolution and change since the beginning.  But something happened in evolution that I'll speak more on later...we have removed many if not all of the evolutionary factors that required this dichotomy from our lives and replaced them with other forces that we didn't directly evolve to cope with (at least not yet).

These forces then work against us as we expand our understanding both in breadth and depth of knowledge.  We have fulfilled some need for learning and understanding, but as we move to create comfort in our lives, we sacrifice some of this drive to understand for stability.  I for one am not pleased with the malaise and utter lack of motivation this encourages.

I'm working on listening and driving for understanding in new places where I may have simply gained the factual knowledge I absolutely needed and eschewed a deep understanding.  Though it looks "on paper" like this should be sufficient, but I posit that we miss so much information that can be cross-connected, re-interpreted, or ground-breaking.  Isn't that the purpose of human society?  Cross-connection and innovation are what keep us alive in the face of a reality that is constantly changing, presenting old challenges in new places, and new challenges we never thought existed.

To end this post, I challenge everyone who reads this to try and look deeper.  dig for more information and understanding in what you read, the people you speak to, and what you hear around you.  Strive for an understanding that will make you capable of innovating and taking the control of your life and environment back.