The life undecided: My life as caught in the whirlpool of engineering and humanities

For the last many years I have been living a double life. And much of my problems like depression and anxiety stem from this duality of life. Career choice or what you chose to do, unfortunately, in this age is not only a source of income but it incorporates the whole of your life, including your leisure, but maybe there is no space for leisure in this age’s definition of work. I am pursuing a Ph.D. in engineering while all I want to do is study something, anything in social sciences or humanities. On the surface it doesn’t look an issue at all and I have treated it as that way but it really is exhausting. The kind of work we do is deeply related to meaning and a work being forced equates to a meaningless existence.

My tragedy is that I find in engineering a purpose now and then. The tragedy for me is confounded by the distance I have covered in the field and by the resources, both of my family and of different scholarships, that have went into my education. The excitement that solving difficult problems in engineering brings is also something that makes you feel valuable. For me it is not just a hate relationship. I like engineering and consider that I can give back to society through it and can make it as a vehicle for change. But the desire to do something else in life is often overwhelming and crippling. If I had been incompetent in the field of engineering, leaving it would have been much easier. Yes, the inability to give enough time to research and the delay in publications and criticism often make me doubt my competence but then that is something everyone in every field can or do face.

I spend most of my waking hours in reading texts on social sciences or humanities or fighting the guilt of not concentrating enough on my own research. That leaves very less time for the actual research which is paying my bills. The guilt, the sense of failure, the sense of meaninglessness, the sense of a life wasted are mountains weighing upon me. And all that turns down to my indecision and lack of direction. This has been my state since the last year or so of engineering. But then my thinking was that it is fleeting feeling and will pass with time. I got a half-fee waiver scholarship for my Masters and published some quality work for my Masters along-with many other papers. While many of my colleagues were burdened by the criteria of at-least one publication as set by our university for graduation, I published five. That made me feel confident that I can pursue a dual career. And may be that was a mistake!

With years the realization that I am not doing what I was meant to do is getting stronger. But now and then that is countered by the realization that what I am doing is necessary, both at personal level and at collective level. It is a whirlpool of confusion. There is a beauty in engineering and meaning in humanities. Yes, there also are prospects of a stable income in engineering and total insecurity in switching fields at this late stage. But the desire to be something else, to be at someplace else, to be doing something other is exasperating. I am trying to make sense of my life and the choices I have made and I will have to make.

May be for people like me who don’t follow a certain fixed path, life is like a wave of crescendos and valleys. For the people who want to do a lot of things but are stuck in one place are destined to a lack of closure. People who want to write but are stripped of imagination by paucity of circumstance have to recreate the will to imagine every waking hour of life. But for now, walking, trying, thinking, moving are the paths to be treaded. The peace of mind may well be an illusion.