I'm glad to be writing again, here in Beijing. Shel and I are on two weeks' vacation and I'm starting to feel the unease, almost one week in, of work-related tension and stress starting to peel off. Exercise has been helping, but today the air pollution is so bad that going running would be like putting my mouth to an exhaust pipe.

So it feels like the emotional analog to that moment in fasting where your tongue starts tasting bad as your body kicks into ketosis -- some say that your body is starting to get rid of toxins that way. JK probably knows what's happening.

Also, something deeper is going on.

Job Fatigue

I think that maybe six years of spiritual drift are starting to catch up to me, particularly with respect to what I do for a living. I work fairly hard, and I give the fruit of my cleverness and insight to this company, and it all seems pretty pointless. After all, the "executive management" is divorced from the specifics of the operation, and they regularly make decisions (or fail to make necessary decisions) that run counter to the spirit of everything I'm trying to do. That's disheartening if it goes on for a short while; but, as I'm seeing, this is a long-term pattern of action, and it isn't likely to change.

Shelley encourages me to look for a new job, or at least explore the possibilities; I tell you, I would rather stay with the familiar evil (with whom I am at least on a level of familiarity) than to start at a new place and pretend that the new evil I encounter is good. Academia is screwy; the business world is screwy. I work for a business that interacts with academia, so I see both sides.

Also, my salary is good, for the position I hold. And I like the guys I work with.

But God it is hollow stuff. I love teaching, and I love seeing people learn and do new things. I love analyzing problems and developing solutions. That's what I'm good at. What I'm not good at is accepting a world wherein I analyze a problem, make it known to management, and have it ignored to the detriment of my employees, our collective students, or the faculty with whom we work.

And I no longer believe that, at the highest levels, this company is interested in helping people.

While I labored under that illusion, I think I could tell myself that work as it was was worth the pain and effort. I got to teach, I got to analyze, and I got to do it in a larger context of usefulness to others. So what if there was no deeper meaning?

That perspective is disintegrating. I feel like I've been fighting a losing battle for the past four or five months in terms of our company doing the right thing by students and faculty (not to mention doing the right thing by our employees).

But more to the point, I guess I still haven't any solid moorings to this job, except for the sense that it exercises my talents better than any job so far. I have some authority, and I can do some brainstorming as well. I hoped that these things would collectively be enough.

What Else Is There?

I lay in bed last night, and Shelley asked me again about moving to China. That question gets at the heart of this problem, I think. My response is, "What would I move to China for? What would I do?" To which she points out some of the opportunities that Jerry has suggested from time to time. And to which I say, "What is there to do here that I wouldn't just do stateside?"

I think that at root here is a deeper question: what's the point -- for me -- of doing any job? What could I do that I would actually be able that answer the question well?

Because, from my college years on, I have believed in doing things with eternal points, I kinda set myself up for failure. I find it hard to believe in a traditionally conceived afterlife, so what's the point of doing anything? Where is the meaning that I might find?

Okay, I dropped a bomb in that last paragraph. It's true: I find nearly all of the stories we tell about the afterlife to be highly improbable at best and laughable wish-fulfillment fantasies at worst. I don't expect some eternal reward for what I do here.

But the idea that what I am doing is just for me, just for exploring me, is ridiculously self-centered. Why live for that? For that matter, why live?

So I'm having a job crisis that is a bit more than a typical job crisis. I'm drifting on the water. Is 34 too young for a midlife crisis?