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You don't have to know who you are

You are more than sum of your parts. You are not committed to your interests, job, profession, or convictions. The commodification of such a complex thing as human persona is ludicrous at best and we should rebel against it. Each time they want to box you because they don't know on which shelf you should be put on, you are free to leap like a frog running for life.

Each time we propose a dichotomy of humanist vs. STEM person we kill chances of someone, somewhere. Someone, somewhere, might decide to not pursue something just because some old hag in educational institution aka child prison decided to laugh off some mistake or decision.

"I'm not good at math, so I guess I wouldn't make a great programmer".

"I like numbers, so I guess I wouldn't make a great writer".

"It's too late to learn X/Y/Z".

It's all bullshit, and you know it. Even if you feel the way as the examples above describe, deep inside yourself, your bullshit detector might buzz a little, letting you know it's all horse crap. Listen to it. It's called therapy.

"I feel bad because I don't enjoy working with clankers and my boss demands it".

Yeah, but listen, you are not a worse person because of this sad state of affairs. You can still enjoy computers. More so if you have not tied yourself up economically, then it's easy peasy. Don't listen to those cocaine-fueled assholes talking about productivity. Or do so, if you are a warrior type. For some it's a serious business type of sprint, for some it's a freakin' Zen garden. And you can always switch your interests.

Know your strengths. If you don't know any of them, it's time to find out. There are many ways to do that, but remember you are biased about yourself, so asking someone trusted about what they think might be a good idea. The most important thing is to not attach yourself to what they say. They might lie a bit to make you feel better. If you do some personality tests, do not attach to the provided images of a person you are presumably like. Focus on what you tend to strive for, e.g. whether people interaction feel you up or drain you down. Whether you are more mental or sensory person. Whether you are feeler or logical person. Whether you are process or goal oriented person. Things like that for starters.

If you ever wanted to try something but haven't because of those mental boundaries that your parent(s) or teacher(s) couldn't cross in their head, then please, consider doing it. Please.

Spoiler alert: you will suck at anything in the beginning. This feeling of sucking will be felt even more if you up until now focused on one thing for a long time. The new thing that you will do doesn't have to be in the same domain as the old one, but can be. If you stared at a screen for 12 hours a day, try some bike repair or woodworking, or write some freakin' poetry. Learn 2 chords and play them endlessly to some drum video. It doesn't really matter that much what you pick up. You will see after some time how does it fit or how you feel about it. The most important thing is to try out something. Try the first, easiest step for 2 minutes, the so-called 2 minutes rule, if you are lost and don't know how to start.

Here's a koan for you: what to respond from now on to this stupid "what do you do in life" (i.e. where do you work so I can place you on my personal social strata map so I can make many assumptions about you as a person) kind of question. My suggestion is to break this strange algorithm and just say something silly, like that you dig holes and then bury them up again so in theory the national GDP goes up.

I'm not trying to be a smart ass about this. We all know that anger is a secondary emotion, and I suppose I'm just sad that we still describe people by putting labels on them. Think about it next time when you see a "Father. Uncle. Christian. Podcaster. Sox fan."-type of description. Yuck.