One of the classes that I took in my first year of university was Psychology 101 as a general elective (my declared major was Physics). It was a big lecture class with like 80 students and so it was a class that a lot of people ended up skipping lectures for and just showed up on test days, but I really enjoyed it. So much did I enjoy it that I gave serious thought to switching to Psychology as a major.
Then I simultaneously discovered both the real Internet and also how bad I actually was at doing and also how much I hated advanced math, and the rest is, as they say, history. At one point in my Computer Science major courses, I ended up taking an honors-level Cognitive Science class and once again, I had the thought that maybe I should change majors; but by then it was too late - I was on my way to graduation and I was too far along in my degree to scrap it and start over.
But what if I had “gone with my gut” that first semester and switched majors or decided to take it as a minor? What would my life be like today if I had? I have this thought a lot, especially lately. Whilst I was unemployed, I thought about it almost all the time. Honestly, I kind of wish that I had maybe minored in psychology so that I could have had all the schooling to prep for a fall-back career or 2nd act in my life for once the luster of the “major” career wore off or got otherwise tarnished.
I really enjoy psychology and I am fascinated by it. I love watching psychological thrillers, cop procedurals, and true-crime documentaries not for the horrific nature of the human brutality per se, but rather for the understanding of the pathologies and neuroses that compel human beings to do those things. And, having spent some time in therapy at various points in my life, helping others to gain an understanding of why they do what they do can be life altering and so immensely helpful to understand. Plus, I like helping people and something like psychology seems to be a lot more along the lines of being “good for humanity” than the tech world has turned out to be, that’s for sure.
I’ve always been interested in computers and the internet and what that arm of technology can do for humanity, but I would not say that I’ve ever really been very good or exceptional at it — a feeling which has become more and more pronounced the longer I stay in this field. I enjoy using technology and understanding it (and being able to modify or work around it if I need to), but my drive to create it has and continues to wane as time marches on. I feel like I’m just solidly average in my software development & design skills and yet have somehow made an entire 30-year career out of it. I guess that means that I’ve apparently been good enough at it to have made a living. I’d like to think that even if I had chosen psychology, I still would have done technical things as a hobby and would still have found my way to the Fediverse, and newsgroups and BBSes and such, and would still be here writing this note today. I am curious about what my level of interaction with tech would have been like without having become a software engineer, to be honest.
Alright, fine… I’m just going to come out and say it: I got duped by the lure of easy money and the “rock star” lifestyle knowing full well that I wasn’t really a computer rock star and it wasn’t even my driving passion in my life. I didn’t really love computers so much as I did the applied use of them. There I said it. I will now turn in my Software Engineer card. I personally think that I would have been a much better psychologist than I ever will be a software engineer.
In any case — and maybe more to the point, sadly — I was drawn away from that first instance of “life direction crisis” by the siren song of vast wads of easy moolah that companies were willing to throw at people like me to do our hobbies professionally just because we knew what the letters “HTML” stood for and had the tenacity to learn how to make computers do even the most basic of things. It took me far too long to realize the corpo scam — and admit that I will probably never be more than maybe “better than average” or “good enough” at the job — to then go back and try to take the path that I ignored in my college days once I realized just how much I had gotten scammed by capitalism and how much technology has likely caused far more societal problems than it has helped.
And by the time I did perhaps have the option to retarget my life to that secondary career while I was unemployed, it was pretty much too late - I was almost 50 years old and I don’t really have the time to go back and complete my psychology training (and also start over at the bottom with unpaid internships and monitored practice). But since capitalism saddles even beginning students with so much debt related to getting that specialized education that they need to start working from day 1 to starting paying it back, there’s really no provision for laying the groundwork for multiple careers simultaneously; just pick one, hope it works for you and if it doesn’t, start over and try again (all the while incurring more and more debt without the means to pay for it).
But I still wonder about that path not taken. A lot.
