I suppose as long as I’m thinking about what I want, I guess I should think about my career.

I don’t know why I’m restless. But pondering that, I realize I don’t know if I’m restless. Or maybe I’ve just been trying to escape a long project, the kind that has traumatized me in the past.

My first job was remote. I was just out of college - but keep in mind that because of various issues, I was 31 by the time I got my bachelor’s degree. I spent my twenties in and out of college, the Navy, unemployed, and finally, blissfully, back into college.

I’m trying to think back and remember why precisely I chose to be a software engineer. As I recall, I was considering a few different options. One of them was being an architect. I’ve never had any interest in architecture, so that might help you to understand that I am not a born computer scientist. I didn’t program much as a teenager - not much beyond scripts and QBASIC, and much of that didn’t work. I occasionally wrote in Inform 6.

I graduated high school thinking about being a musician and a poet and an actor. I went to college, went to another college, dropped out and joined the Navy, went back to college, went to a different college, dropped out, went to a different college and graduated. Along the way I considered music theory and composition, teaching high school band, creative writing, philosophy, English Literature, psychology, and sociology. Maybe others that I can’t recall now.

Never once, until my last trip through college, did computer science seriously cross my mind. Nor mathematics.

I think the fact is that I thought I was “good with computers” and that I might turn that into a way of making money. I was also interested in creating a software system capable of planning and writing the novels that I wanted to write. My final semester of college (this is how naïve I was), I applied for a job with the tiny company that made the product that most closely resembled what I had wanted to build for myself, a desktop document database system. It was the only job I applied for. I got the job.

(I say a software system, not an app, not an application, because I was aware that what I wanted might require a suite of applications, or an ecosystem, something closer to Microsoft Office than Microsoft Word. Or that it was likely to have a content server, a map server, photo galleries with inspiration, etc etc etc. It wasn’t just a personal database.)

But what do I want now? I suppose I enjoy taking imaginary systems and making them real. I don’t always know how to do that - I think I’m weak in DSA…

(I actually gotta get back to doing LeetCode, because regardless of how stupid I think interviewing with it is, and how unlike the day-to-day work of software engineering it is, it’s still a lovely way to have a problem with defined objectives, clear requirements, and rapid feedback cycles.)

…but I enjoy the process just the same.

I was intoxicated at first by infrastructure engineering for the same reason that I was intoxicated at first with large language models: it seemed like I could do so much more. I could spin up an entire computer instead of a text window. I could specify an entire computer network and all of its services. It reflected a lot of the work I had done with MediaWiki, Drupal, etc, to manage my ideas (when I wasn’t looking at desktop software).

Today, I feel strongly that I should stop using LLMs to do things. At work, whatever, I’m mandated. But in my free time? No. I must not. I’ve noticed the effects of it. I’ve noticed that I use it to commit and push code now, instead of writing commit messages myself (admittedly, I’ve rarely been conscientious about this).

The industry is going to go the way it’s going to go. That’s fine. If I’m an employee, I’ll do what I’m paid to do, and how they want it done, and try to do so to the best of my ability. But I don’t think I’m serving my best interests, or my employer’s best interests, by using it outside of work to replace my own efforts.

But what do I want to write? I suppose I see everything as mathematics now. Which might seem weird, given I’m not traditionally strong in mathematics. I passed calculus… on my third or fourth attempt. I’ve never been good at doing the work with mathematics. I’ve never put in the effort for very long.

And I guess I do see everything as writing, too. So writing mathematics?

I had a painful experience a year ago, when I applied for a job and was rejected… at the CEO approval stage. And only once I’d gotten really excited about that job. The company had been formed on the premise of a scientific paper, about 107 pages with citations, discussing the combination of simulations and artificial intelligence and how useful they are in the development of new scientific and technical knowledge. And I wanted to help build these systems, so much so that I was crushed when they rejected me.

This became, I guess, a part of the story that I tell myself. It became a bit of a mission to “show them” that they’d missed out on someone, a person that had potential along these lines. I bought a lot of books about machine learning and MLOps and read a couple of them. I bought a lot of books about complexity science and read a couple of them. But then I bought a lot of books about organizational dynamics and social psychology and read a couple of them. And then I bought a few books about cybernetics and have started reading…

There’s a deep question left unresolved in my mind: how good could I be at mathematics? Mathematics, the language underlying seemingly all of reality. The thing that I’d hardly passed a class on after the fourth grade. I get discouraged when it gets hard. A really smart person, I think, finds math easy. They get the Calculus homework and they run through it, from beginning to end. They always remember the Chain Rule.

I don’t remember Calculus II. I remember something about series. Literally that’s it. I know that I learned about integrals in Calculus I. And yet I got a B in that class. I took Discrete after that, and passed, though I remember not putting in much effort and having trouble following the ideas. I took a Statistics class - the kind that requires calculus - and it was about the hardest thing I’d ever done. I sat in the first row, attended every class, and did each homework assignment three times: when it was assigned, when we had a unit test, and again before the final. If I recall correctly, I got a C+. I remember nothing else from that class. I’m not positive I earned that grade.

So I’m anxious about math. It’s tender for me. I think it’s incredibly important. But I’m afraid to put too much energy into it, lest it turn out that I have good tools and significant privilege and still just can’t learn anything more complicated than differential rules.

I need to go back to MathAcademy. And probably repeat all that I’ve done of Mathematical Foundations II, and possibly Mathematical Foundations I. That seems crazy, and it would mean redoing months of work, but I think I’ve half-assed it in places. I put it off, I criticized the tools, I half-assed it, and then… what do you know, it got hard. I stopped learning as quickly. It was less fun. And so I’d put it off, criticize the tools, and half-ass it more.

But there is no royal road to Geometry, and mathematics is the most important thing I could be learning right now. I need to master mathematics, up to and including things like diff eq, lattice theory, topology, etc. I need to go as far as math can go and possibly push it further. I need to do that to be able to express rigorously the things I imagine.

But beyond that, I want to understand mathematics. It’s exactly the kind of thinking that I want to be doing. It’s the kind of thinking I would feel privileged to be able to do. It would be even more incredible to be paid well for it.

My job rejection led me, indirectly, to the Santa Fe Institute, and complexity science. I think that interests me. I like the ideas of symmetries of behavior, patterns that hold true at multiple scales. I like it for the same reason I like LeetCode; it’s a beautiful idea. I like concision, symmetry, minimalism. I would love to have ideas like those behind ant colony algorithms, boids, etc.

I’d like to observe nature and see the mathematics behind it. The calculus of the way a tree blows in the breeze. The cellular automata of a snail shell. And find new phenomena and new mathematics behind it. I think it’s everywhere, right? So there must be value in describing its expression, right?

So returning to the books I wanted to write, and the software I wanted to write to help me write those books… what might that look like, now? I suppose what I wanted was something that could express every possible aspect of every possible story. Some encoding that could allow me to move laterally between genre, plot, theme, characterization, etc etc etc. A mathematics of story, story being anything that could happen in reality plus countless things that could not happen in reality plus metadata like authorial intent that we have no good reason to believe exists in reality. So a mathematics of intention and influence, perhaps.

Or if we view a story not as a simulacrum, but just as an arrangement of words composed to provoke a speculation, then the mathematics of provoking speculation? And intention and influence?

But then, we find that coming close to psychology, to the mind - a story that the human body seems to tell itself, that there’s a self with qualities and characteristics and a mortgage and rheumatoid arthritis and a wife and a kid and a blog.

The mind and what it tells itself. I guess a mathematics of consciousness.

That’s actually hilarious. Ludicrous. Ridiculous. The thing I want to solve is literally the hardest problem that any human would ever have to solve. We have multi-billion-dollar industries based on tiny, tiny portions of this problem. And there are as many problems in consciousness as grains of sand in all the beaches in the world. We don’t know much about consciousness collectively, and almost none of us knows anything individually.

I guess that’s what I would want to have done. Since I can’t just wave a wand, then I have to think further about what I want to do. In other words, how I work toward this overarching goal that I may be intellectually or chronologically incapable of solving. Perhaps I can treat that journey as the ends in itself.

What goals might contribute toward this? Well, I think perhaps I would like to get a doctorate in mathematics. That implies a mastery of the standard curricula of mathematics, up through real analysis and beyond. I don’t really know at what point they say “you can stop now, where do you want to go?” And I am not against the idea of studying more mathematics. Afraid, yes. Against, no.

I don’t think we’ve found the answer yet. Not that I’d know if we had. But regardless, I have a great amount of work to do in this area. I have books on complexity science, organizational dynamics, artificial intelligence, language, mythopoetics, mythology, religion, history, fiction, design, management, manufacturing, etc. Each of these has a tremendous amount to teach me. Each of these should be a goal. I should, as I’ve suggested, rotate through books. Parallelize, not serialize. Mark my place in each and drop it when I tire. The goal should be to stimulate thought, and if I’m bored or sleepy then my thought isn’t being stimulated and I need to find something else.