Paranoia Overdone: A Ramble On Life

I wrote the following for a long-dormant blog I keep at work. The blog spaces are still there, and I imagine certain personality types maintain them for the purposes of either developing their technical reporting chops or keeping communication with teams and employees. Mine was just the usual off-the-cuff blather, and hasn't been written to since November of 2012. (I wrote about stock options after a grant expired with the market price below the grant price, and how I surely wasn't the only one who didn't pay attention the previous summer when it was several dollars above. Commenters agreed I wasn't.)

Recent events and developments gave me a theme that I suddenly felt like blasting into the corporate space. But as I wrote, I didn't stop soon enough, and found myself expressing opinion and feelings that might, just might, be career-limiting if seen by the wrong people at the wrong time. So I'm putting the first draft here and not there for the time being ... fully aware of the irony in my actions being in direct opposition to the feeling expressed.

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Andy Grove's famous guiding motto, "Only The Paranoid Survive," may be a good philosophy to drive a highly competitive business, and it may make sense to people such as him who are driven to succeed materially after fleeing a materially suppressive environment. But after several decades trying to live on this planet, as a relatively prosperous human (i.e. American) whose main goals are to be supportive of family and loved ones and achieve a modest material and spiritual satisfaction, I have come to realize:

"Only The Paranoid Survive" is an absolutely shitty way to run your life.

I have spent years and decades conforming to corporate, academic, and social environments in the main so that I could get to the end without seeming to screw it up, avoid poverty when I'm old, and perhaps even leave some money behind for my children. This is an attitude borne of ancestors who struggled through pioneering the West only to be hit by the Depression, and who decided Never Again once the post-WWII prosperity lifted them up. And it worked for them, in that they did not end their days in poverty hence avoided what they dreaded most, being a burden to their children. But of late I have learned that the cages I inhabited and the hoops I jumped through, while protecting me and my family from daily fear of starvation, did not increase my happiness; that conversely, paths more aligned with who I really was would have left me poorer but very likely more satisfied with what I had been doing.

"You can tell an artist," an old high school friend remarked, after I admired her decision to pursue a jazz career in New York City for the past thirty years. "They have bad teeth because they can't afford to go to the dentist."

But she's happy and has happy children and in fact just premiered an Afro-Caribbean-jazz opera to rave reviews, a natural product of years of creative living. I'm not seeing the down side to all those years she was unable to even consider having a mortgage to worry about. Yes, I had a mortgage, and a big beautiful house I built on land I bought, and for awhile I felt like a secure and solid citizen keeping all cause for paranoia at bay. Indeed it was my wife's paranoia, borne of a background similar to mine, that drove and enabled our material success. But at what cost? My children are happy because I raised them to be, not because I worked at this or that corporation all their lives; and now, while it's fun to participate as a global power in our global business, I regret I have no opera coming to fruition.

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That, of course, is not at all true. Nice dramatic effect, but my life has given me an enormous amount of material for writing into fiction should I ever get serious about it. In truth I'm glad I had those homes and am particularly glad I was able to hold to convention long enough to see both my sons move away as adults before I did the same (though "adult" may be a bit of a stretch in my case).

Furthermore, I can't honestly disagree with Mr. Grove. His motto really meant that to survive and thrive, a corporation needs to try new things and watch out for details. This is true in every aspect of engineering and some aspects of family life, and is not something I reject.

So this whole idea came up from a conversation late last night, and I am still percolating and settling and discovering what it (and what it all) really means. Grove's saying seemed particularly idiotic in that context, and because it's driven my life as a corporate employee (or more accurately, failing to follow it has limited my life as a corporate employee) it came to mind, out of context like that, as something I finally saw I needed to reject. But in this light of day, it needs more of a ponder.