Your "Calling"

[Angrboda]

I don't think I've found my calling yet

When I was younger, everybody told me my calling was in computers. Yeah, I'm good at it, and I enjoy it, but it's not really my center.

I'm not fundamentally someone who finds interest in the practical. I need to be breaking down barriers, extending the limits, out in the ozone. Computers just isn't that, unless you do purely theoretical work, and there are extremely few jobs in that. So computers have never been the warp and woof of my dreams.

I pursued other dreams when I was younger. I have a talent for mathematics. I dabbled in philosophy, and activism as a radical feminist. I spent a few years studying international business and management. I spent two years becoming fluent in French on my own dime. And I've been fascinated by psychology my whole life, both abnormal psych and the subject of cognitive bias. I consider cognitive science and philosophy of mind my specialty.

I've had a lot of interests over the course of a lifetime. I think, perhaps, it's especially difficult when you're young to identify that one thing that really excites you and can give you deep satisfaction over the course of a lifetime. When you're young, everything seems exciting, but the future is completely uncertain. What will I like in ten years? What will make me happy 20 years from now? Where is a good place to be next year? Five years from now? 50 years from now?

Like Kichi, who I am has only clarified itself in hindsight.

I spent time doing philosophy, but never identified it as my special thing, which it is. Nor did I guess that I would care less about what I was doing than where I'd be doing it.

Figuring those things out when you're young, is, I think, very hard. It was for me. And yet we expect it of you, like it would be nothing at all for you to figure it out.