I had my annual review last week.

Great Year

This means I was consistently exceeding the expectations of my role at the company. My previous company was acquired. We were thrust into a quagmire of disorganization and confusion. That's how I felt anyway. Eventually the VP of the new company was replace by the CTO of my previous company. Things settled down a bit. The Engineering Manager for the new company was fired. My title was changed to Engineering Manager for a combined US engineering team of seven developers.

I'm not sure how to evaluate this time period. I'm more proud of the work I did before the acquisition. Everything afterward is confusion. The only thing of note I can think of that I contributed was a short post on how I would approach rebuilding trust between the engineering team and the leadership of the company.

All of that aside, what I'm wrestling with now is whether or not I want to be having a Great Year at work. Do I want to be exceeding expectations?

I do.

There is part of me that wants to be a person who does not care about work or about what people at work think about me. That is not who I am. I care about my work. I care about doing a good job, about improving the experience of my team and of myself within the company while also helping the company to succeed.

Will I care about this work in 20 years?

I hope not. I hope I care more about other things. I hope I am in a place where I feel more freedom to care about other things. I hope that time is sooner than twenty years out.

Right now, I'm not in that place. I feel the stress of the team not working as well I want it to. I feel the stress of people's discomfort with each other. I feel the stress of needing enough money to create a special needs trust for my son so there is money for his care should something happen to me. I don't know how much time I will get to do this work. I don't know how much time I will get in a high paying job before something changes.

My wife's uncle was fired a few months ago from a company he had been at for twenty years or more. The next month he was diagnosed with cancer. I am not immune to these swift changes in life position. I have experienced them before.

Would I be happier if I worked less? Would I be happier if I wasn't as stressed about work?

I don't know. I might be bored. Stress is engagement and care taken too far. I cannot simply turn this off. Numbing takes away the pleasure and the pain. Maybe I can decrease my dosage. I think I need that. I would like to be able to sleep at night without my brain racing about problems at work that I haven't figure out yet. I would like to have more energy for myself, for my spouse, my children and my friends.

I'm not sure I can get there by caring less.

I think it will be through caring differently. I can learn to be more patient with change. I'm not writing code anymore. Even then, when it just me against the machine, my patience would wear thin quite often when something didn't work as I thought it should.

My wife said this to me recently. It was something she had seen on Instagram, a way to calm the nerves, to remember the big picture.

Most of life is not an emergency and doesn't surrender to my need for immediate change. Change is slow. Long term change is accomplished through gentle nudges and redirections more than swift, violent action.

Swift change requires constant, high and sustained energy. I don't have that kind of energy to exert.

What options are left to me? I can be more patient. I can be more accepting of the time it takes. I can be more accepting of my own limitations. I can ask for more help from others.

I can do all of this without caring any less. I can then take that extra energy and spend it somewhere else, somewhere I would rather be, somewhere my twenty years older self will look back on and appreciate. Maybe. We will see.