
# Everybody is More Complex Than They Seem

*This year I decided that I want to share my most important learnings about
engineering, teams and quite frankly personal mental health.  My hope is that
those who want to learn from me find it useful.*

When I wake up in the morning I usually have something to do.  That
doesn't necessarily mean I will do that, but it grounds me.  When I was
21 my existence was quite monochromatic.  I went to bed in the evening and
I continued my work in the morning where I left it off the day before.
And like a good performing stock, through that I went “up and to the
right”.  Probably all the metrics I would have used to measure my life
were trending in only one direction and life was good.  Work defined me
and by my own standards and enough people that I interacted with I was
successful.

But this monochromatic experience eventually becomes a lot more complex
because you're forced to make choices in life.  When I went to conferences
or interacted with other people online it was impossible not to compare
myself in one way or another.  My expectations and ambitions were steered
by the lives of others around me.  As much as I wanted to not compare
myself to others, I did.  Social media in particular is an awful way to do
that.  Everybody self censors.  You will see much more of people's
brightest sides of their life than all the things that go wrong.

However even armed with that knowledge, it took me a long time to figure
out how to think about myself in that.  In the most trivial of all
comparisons you take yourself and you plot yourself against other people
of similar age that you aspire to and then measure yourself against in
some form and then you keep doing that over time.

There are some metrics that are somewhat obvious: your salary or income,
your wealth, your debts, how much money you're able to spend without
thinking about it.  These are somewhat obvious and usually you're on some
sort of trajectory about all of these.  However there are less obvious
things that are harder to measure.  For instance if you are married, if
you have children, what clout you have in your field or at work, if you
are doing well mentally or physically.

I realized more than once that for me to be happy, I have to balance out a
lot of these and sometimes they are at odds with each other, and sometimes
you don't know what you have been missing until after you made a decision.
I did not know I want to be a father until we decided to become parents.
But the moment we made that decision, everything changed.  Now that this
is part of me it's part of my personality going forward.  The act of being
a parent does not make me a better or worse person, but it makes my life
just be fundamentally different than before.  These significant changes to
how we live our lives, are sudden and deep.  We are not ballistic objects
flying along a single trajectory representing our success and life
accomplishments, our lives are too nuanced for that.  The graph you can
plot about your income might not correlate with the graph about the state
of your mental health or the graph of the quality of your relationships.
It might be nice if they all go up simultaneously at once, but will they
ever?

I still wake up in the morning with a purpose and goals.  What has changed
is that what starts me into the day is now more colorful.  I make more
explicit choices in the evening about what my next day comprises of.  The
tasks of the day feed from many different parts of my life.  There is
work, there is career progression, there is health, there is family, there
is amusement.  There are good days where all these things line up well and
there are days where nothing really wants to work.

The most important lesson for me was loving myself and the path I'm on,
and how utterly destructive it can be to myself to not be in balance about
my true goals and desires.  Finding this balance for me became
significantly easier by recognizing that my goals and desires have to come
from myself and not by looking outwards to others.  Something that became
significantly easier for me when I started picturing others as the complex
and multifaceted beings they are.
