(Nothing here is to hurt anyone’s feelings, and not at all to disrespect, but it’s gonna sound like it anyway. A rant).
I think doing engineering, and later, engineering jobs (at least for me) is fundamentally pointless. Especially computer science done through a bare minimum college, with a lowest common denominator degree, taught by professors who have long stopped caring, surrounded by students whose highest metaphysical aspiration is to work for “FAANG.” Not to build, not to understand, not even to ask “why”, just to get in.
This ecosystem quietly trained me to create nothing unless it comes with a material or social reward. To learn only what converts cleanly into employability. To treat curiosity as a liability and wonder as an inefficiency. The logic is brutally simple: learn to land a job; land a job to buy things; buy things to justify the job.
And the things are always the same. A better house. A better car. Either one with an engine that roars like a tiger, so I can pretend I’m powerful, or one quiet enough to erase the indignity of commuting through age-old trains in the misty, damp Mumbai air. Progress, apparently, is measured by how effectively you can insulate yourself from other human beings.
Enough said?
Somewhere along the way, the version of me inside me died! Slowly, politely, without making a scene. It happened while listening to colleagues discuss how to make more money, what to learn next for a “better” job, how to rebalance investments for optimal returns, and finally how to escape to a foreign university whose name I can barely pronounce, just to flee a country where making money feels pointless unless you’re building something of your own (or scamming the people).
Building things.
That was supposed to be the point. I have an engineering degree, after all.
Instead, I learned to chase prestigious job titles and worship “cutting-edge” technologies, not because they excite me, but because they keep me “relevant” in an ever-changing, violently unstable “job market.” (who the fuck came up with that term?) As if I’m a fish dragged out of the ocean and kept barely alive in a glass tank, labeled, priced, and displayed in a fish market. That’s where I am now. Nothing feels organic. Nothing feels alive. Nothing feels like it exists because of me or for me.
I could scream at the top of my lungs and no one would notice.
Those who possess that mysterious, almost mythical force called “passion” don’t have time to explain themselves anyway. They’re busy creating things that actually reshape the world. And then there’s me, sitting still, paralyzed by the sheer volume of microscopic, soul-numbing tasks required just to move one step forward in a career I don’t believe in. I’ve started believing that I don’t exist or that I don’t possess skills or intellect to create anything of my own.
I already know where this road leads.
A house that costs crores in a city where I can barely breathe, paid off slowly through EMIs that quietly dictate every decision I make. A car with non-roaring electric silence (and EMIs!). A job I probably don’t hate but not like, performed daily to keep the dream alive. And if I ever become “successful,” maybe I’ll pay those EMIs outright, or better yet, keep them for tax optimization and call that freedom. Ohh; and don’t forget foreign trips, because even though I know jack shit about the places I visit, I still have to go there just to justify my wealth and status.
Let’s step back for a moment. Who am I? And more importantly, do you even care?
Because the world stopped caring the day I crossed to this side of life. The day I entered engineering college, I lost the ability to think about “the world”, I started thinking only about my survival within it. It took less than a decade to rewire every atom in my body to believe that survival is the highest moral good, and that living is optional.
Don’t tell me to get hobbies outside office hours. I can. But they’re ornamental. Decorative. Performative. Everything I do feels like a performance. Writing a poem. Sketching a dog’s face. Lifting heavy objects to sculpt my body. It’s all just a show. Content for myself, an audience of one, applauding out of obligation. Even the relationships I’ve are transactional, they provide me either societal validity or the material beauty.
I am nobody to myself.
The way I work is not defined by me. The way I chase happiness has nothing to do with being happy. The way I love is not the way I want to love. It’s all inherited. Borrowed. Imposed. Yours!!
Who am I to be rebellious anyway? Maybe it isn’t the college. Maybe it isn’t even the country. Maybe it’s “engineering” itself, not as a discipline, but as a system. A system that quietly converts human beings into well-behaved functions optimized for output, stability, and return on investment.
So this is the line I draw.
It’s time to reclaim myself from the version I’ve been engineered into. I would rather suffer for being myself than suffer for failing to become who you want me to be. Life is suffering either way, I’d just prefer suffering that at least belongs to me.
I’d rather spend my money on stupidity and experiments than park it in a hedge fund for a dignified 12% annual return. I’d rather choose a degree because it’s fun, destabilizing, and alive than one that simply guarantees employment. I’d rather build something useless that feels real than optimize my existence for a future I don’t even want to arrive at. I would rather be erratic than to be cautious. I would rather be wrong than to be noble.
Because if this is what “living” looks like, then maybe “dying” deserves another look. I don’t care what output I create, I do want to care what I ought to be is the reality of “me” and not yours.