Work | Ayush Mangal

A long walk to work

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently 24 years old, with a professional lifespan of ~2.5–3 years , so talking about something spanning 40 years of my life, while I haven’t even lived 25 of my own in the first place, feels a little weird, but what else do you do on a nice lazy Sunday morning? Also out of the 24 years lived, I just remember the ones from around the 16th year, and so I really feel more like 8 year old¹, the first 16 years all seem coalesced into this one giant panorama of blurry snapshots of past memories².

While no one can predict how long a career would last, owing to the unpredictability of both death, and health³ , if all goes well, it would at least be for 40 odd years, if not more, owing to the improvements in healthcare, given that society sets an average retirement age of 60ish?

Even though I can’t really imagine sitting on a beach⁴ somewhere, enjoying my retirement reading books for the rest of my life after that, there would be some element of work, in some form. Given the fact that my ability to create impact would probably be the maximum at that age, given the connections I have hopefully developed by that time⁵, and the free time that old age would provide, should more or less offset the depreciation in productivity that a declining health will lead to.

Thinking about this long journey ahead, actually feels quite relaxing, it takes the pressure off my shoulders to reach certain “milestones” earlier in life, since there is quite a bit of time to do whatever I want to do. It makes it okay to spend a few more months in the city you have come to love⁶, in a job that you don’t love anymore, or spend a bit more time with the people you have come to think of as family, before leaving your nest once again. It makes it okay to take that job that excites you, but doesn’t pay that well. It makes it okay to stay with your family for a bit longer, and put aside the plans for exploring the countries you want to explore for sometime. It makes it okay to spend some more time learning the ropes of your field, to become a student again and pursue your intellectual curiosities a bit more.

Taking this long view, also makes me appreciate the value of the people around me quite a bit. It only makes sense, that other people will have their own 40 year career around me, and will achieve things which are incredibly hard to predict right now. You never know who will become what, or who you’ll get close to, and it just makes it super important to treat everyone well, and also looking back at the brief career I already have had, it was the people who defined the life I was having⁷.

Another important thing to take care of is quite obviously my health. I am already kind of a fitness enthusiast of sorts⁸, but there is a lot in the mental space that needs to be worked upon. It becomes evident on the days when I am sick, or even slightly under the weather, how futile everything else suddenly seems, and all things come to halt, until my body is back to normal, so if this machine needs to be working for 40 more years, it will only do so under proper maintenance and under acceptable workloads, its possible to overclock it a bit at times, but not always⁹.

Also, the work I do will definitely change over time, I will probably not be an IC for 40 years, and my work will not be defined by what I do, but what I enable other people to do¹⁰, and thus its increasingly more important to get better at people skills, not just my technical skills. Also, the field which I work in, which is currently AI, might change, and I might find an alternative career more fulfilling, or just be forced into it due to any number of reasons¹¹, this puts things in perspective, when it sometimes feel like the work I am doing right now, is the only sort of work I’ll be doing forever.

So much for a 40+ year long career, so many things to explore, people to meet, places to be and…

Work to be done.

Tangents

My emotional age, might actually be somewhere around that lol
This reminds me of the ending of the Death’s end, when SPOILER ALERT, the entirety of humanity is converted from a 3D world, to a 2D image of sorts, only in my case, its like time is flattened into one place for the first score of my life, so it would be more like a 3D cube.
Increasingly started to think about health-span, instead of just lifespan after reading David Sinclair’s book Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To
Actually, make that a library, my old bod might need the beach sun, but the brain would crave library, OR actually, I’ll take my Kindle equivalent to the beach lol
I currently suck at making professional ( or even for that matter personal ) connections, but that will hopefully improve over time, or I’ll shamelessly latch on the connections of the few people I know, similar to how my strategy for making friends as a kind of introvert is to just befriend one very extroverted person lol ( cue to my super extrovert pseudo-sister here )
Hyderabad — home, hardest city to leave.
There is this view of not making friends at work, I disagree with it, maybe its just yet to be broken naivety, but its impossible for me to not connect with the people I work on a more personal level, when I spend almost the entirety of 5/7 of my days with them
Someone recently pointed out, that this is in fact not the case, I am just good at controlling my impulses for junk food and I just like to work out lol
Which is a bit hard while working in a rapidly growing startup
While I’ll always want to be an IC in some capacity, I do understand that I am not super talented enough to keep growing in that role, and will have to leverage other people’s talents to make up for my own
Plain old market forces, or a war, AI automation, hostile AGI takeover, something like the cultural revolution in China, climate change, health, family commitments, aliens, super-intelligent animal takeover, or

Originally published on Medium.

Occupational Hazards

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The term occupational hazard is usually used to describe “physical” hazards, which one is exposed to in the process of pursuing their occupation/work. Like being exposed to anthrax as a wool rearer, dangerous radiations for nuclear factory workers or just plain old back pain in the tech industry (I am turning 24, and my back is already starting to show signs of rebel, even if I am fairly physically active).

What stroke my fancy in one of my ever present parallel thought plane of mental existence, was the “personality” hazards which your career might expose you to.

I have been working in the tech industry for a little over 2 years now, and a little introspection makes it clear that my personality has been affected by my choice of occupation, if its been a hazard or not in this regard, is upto anyone’s guess.

I think my current mental utility function, the force that drives me, assuming I am a rational agent (which I certainly am not), is heavily conditionally dependent on my occupation. A lot of things which are important to me as a person, might not have hold any value for me if I was in a different career.

I am a deeply individualistic person (having already use the phrase “I” 9 times since beginning this article), and I don’t really care about anyone other than myself except maybe a very small handful of people, which sounds like something you’d say to sound dramatic, but I mean that in all seriousness. Sometimes I wonder how much of it is my innate nature, and how deeply I am nurtured by the occupation I pursue. Tech as an industry is individualistic, fascinated by powerful individual role models who created a path beyond all odds and despite all costs. With leaders using wartime terminology in boardrooms, somehow glorifying the horrific destruction that is a war, to the chants of doing “whatever it takes” to win the arms race to technical supremacy.

I am not looking to question the culture,I myself am a child of, but I wonder, what would happen if I took upon a different career path. What would be my values. Currently I only care about my own success, have little regard to whatever the hell happens to society or even the people around me, I am deeply meritocratic, almost certainly sapiosexual and I work in an industry which has seen an influx of the most talented (and often ruthless) brains of the generation, and is capitalism incarnate it its most glorious ( and scary) manifestation in the 21st century. People (including yours truly) are driven by profits, by academic/professional glory, relationships are put on the sidelines and the most unlikely of alliances are forged for a chance to get a chance to make an “impact” on the world, and transform our society, often forgetting, that that’s not the only way to make an impact or even the most “impactful” one.

In contrast to this individualism, I wondered, what if I went into maybe something like the military, what would that make of me. I don’t have any idea of what goes inside a military life, but surely it involves a level of sacrifice of the individual identity? Atleast while watching a military parade, with people clad in the same uniforms (maybe decorated with varying level of paraphernalia indicating their rank), marching in groups to the same beat, their must be a strong sense of belonging to a larger group and of surrendering yourself to a cause, for the greater good. I don’t think when my job is to literally protect other people, I would care a lot about what petty concerns make of my daily headache in my current life, and obviously that life comes with its very own (and MUCH more physical) occupational hazards, but I was just wondering if I was drawn to the tech world because it suits my personality, or my personality has just been moulded to like the work I do.

Or what if I was a doctor? It feels like such a noble profession, though I know there is a LOT of stress and pain and occupational hazards that go into that lifestyle, but again, would that have made me a “better” person, would my personality be more caring, more sensitive and empathetic to the suffering of others, or would it have made me numb to it all, due to the constant overexposure to it?

I also often wonder about the total absence of social responsibility I carry, bordering almost to an apathy to whatever socio-political issues in the world around me, always having a feeling that all these problems are happening somewhere else in the world, and are not my problem. But what if I was working in an NGO, would I have been able to turn away my eye and pretend not to see anything wrong while staring right at the problems that are omnipresent around us. As an example, I am finding myself unable to look street beggars in the eye, because it somehow makes me very uncomfortable, and I can’t do any better than just pretend they don’t exist or I don’t see them, and that is so fucking brutal, because its only a coin flip which decides which side of the line I was born in, and it doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to even make me cross lines from one end to another in the future, and be on the receiving end of being pushed around in a world, that pretends to not see you, exist.

Maybe it’s just the nascent emotional maturity developing inside me, as I am growing slightly older, although still being VERY young emotionally to be sensitive to a lot of issues, that my brain is making me think of all these things. It has affected the content I am consuming, the books I am reading (I am very much interested in history, political books, even though I didn’t like them before). I don’t know if its just a phase of life, where my brain is trying to figure out what its identity is, and how much of it, is just a result of occupational hazards in a mad industry?

Originally published on Medium.