I was an obsessive tv series binge-watcher in my teens. One of the numerous titles was “The Big Bang Theory” that I enjoyed while it was ongoing around 2010. Only recently (around two years ago) I have realized the degree of influence towards my personality and decided to write it down.
The show got me interested to become a scientist and try myself in the academia. It created an image of a cool scientist, nerdy and funny. That’s why, up to a certain degree, I’ve tried to learn lambda calculus, followed a lot of people from academia, learned about type theory, read different papers, played with Agda, Twelf and other proof assistants, visited SPLV 2019, and participated in the creating of functional programming course for Ural Federal University (this was mostly about giving back to the community and getting teaching experience). I seriously thought about applying for different PhD programs.
Sounds great and cool! Except the fact that most of this, at the beginning, was about Ego. The biggest motivation was the desire to build an image of a smart person who has a PhD degree, knows cool words and facts, draws mysterious smart-looking diagrams on the board and notebook using greek letters and arrows. It was all about collecting and assigning different attributes myself that seemed cool to me, building a simulacrum and an absolute fetishization of it.
It took me some time (years) to realize this and finally give up on this absurd quest. I have tried myself in teaching, learning things, creating educational materials, and tried to contribue to different scientific projects (not much). Yes, of course, I enjoyed some of these activities. I learned a lot of interesting things and it was a pleasant experience. But it was a wrong direction. A good test to check if the path is correct is to ask yourself (citing Naval Ravikant):
Would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn’t ever tell anybody about it? That’s how I know it’s real. That’s how I know something I actually want.
That’s a perfect way to figure out what’s worth learning. What’s the real interest. Unfortunately, I have learned it too late. I realized that I overvalued the theoretical and scientific stuff, that I prefer engineering and the practical side. It just feels more natural to me. And it took me some time to understand that software engineering is not less cool than doing science. All activities are different and require different skills. All we need to do is to find what suits ourselves better and makes happy.
I talked to great researchers (who are amazing persons) about their experience and everyday work. I learned that scientists depend on their funding, on grants and writing grant proposals, and they can’t just start researching what they find interesting. They deal with a lot of bureaucracy (which I can’t stand, I’m extremely allergic to it) and exist in the rigid social structure (a university or a research institution), while I value freedom too much.
That’s how removing the Ego from the equation was a major factor that helped me to resolve my long-standing self-identification crises — to be an engineer or a scientist.