Was it Worth it?

Ive been doing some reflecting again...

As I'm sure Ive mentioned before, throughout my life, I seem to have repeatedly and reliably chosen a path of greater experience over greater wealth. Which is to say that Ive made choices that have sacrificed my financial gain in favour of my experiential gain.
And, if asked why I believe Id have always said that the intent has been "self improvement" as a higher priority than wealth.
And there are plenty of people who would have made a more or less opposite choice believing wealth to be of higher value since it can be translated at any time into "opportunities for personal growth" at will... And again there are plenty of other people who would have chosen entirely other paths like fame and power and friends and family etc etc etc... There are a large list of human motivations and every one of us makes our own "priority list" of them and applies them to our life choices in our own special ways :)

Right but to get to the point of this post... After 50 years of making my choices in more or less the same way, the question arises... Was it Worth it?

Which is essentially asking what have I achieved with my choices that I would not have achieved other-wise? But that of course is a very difficult thing to assess sine we can each only live one set of choices... We cant know with any real confidence what turns our lives would have taken if we'd made even a single significant life choice differently let alone half a century of accumulated life choices... No real surprise there though.

However, in direct comparison to the "other" contender for choices that I mentioned, the "cost" of my choices is actually easier to measure in a probably not too inaccurate a way... My choices have very likely reduced my accumulated net worth by between $500K and a million dollars (over the course of a 25 year career in engineering). And of the other choices of "priority structure" I have no idea how to measure the differences???

... But are there any real "choices" for any of us anyway???... We are who we are and it seems to me that our individual "priority structures" stem largely from our personalities and then get somewhat molded by our experiences through life... But we don't really get to choose our personalities or even as far as I can tell to make any real changes to them anyway.
Which is to say,  I cant think of anyone who Ive ever met who has "changed" in any significant way during their life... ever!

... And, I'm a perfect example to look at... because I'm a case that self declares as having generally prioritized experience and growth opportunities in my life... Sure there are plenty of people who take those sort of choices a lot further than I do but as a "moderate" example, I would hope that after 50 years of trying it, I would have achieved some measurable "growth" or change!

But, I don't think I can...
Now of course I feel that I am very much the same me as Ive always been; as Ive always felt... That's what everyone feels about themselves I expect... Its kind of the definition of "being"... a continuous stream of consciousness, yes?
But what I mean is that I don't think Ive changed my personality in any chosen direction. And nore do I feel that Ive done anything at all of any significance that affects other people or the world in any way that's any different from anyone else.
And if that's the case, then whats the point of "collecting" all the experiences?... Am I a better person for it? Do I feel that Ive "Improved"?  Am I "better" than someone else (terrible way to think) or "better" than the old me? Have I done anything useful (or dis-useful for that matter?) ... What the hell is the point of the experiences if they don't get put to use to achieve some-thing?... Perhaps I may as well have put my efforts toward collecting dollars, or collecting friends, or maybe it would have been just as useful to collect a life sized pile of stones for that matter?... maybe counting grains of sand at the beach would have been just as effective a life?... How do we tell?  ... I'm sure that kind of question lingers in the back of most of our minds in a nebulous way for much of our adult lives... or maybe its just those of us with too much time on our hands and nothing better to do :)

I think the general wisdom is that we are successful if we are happy, and the choices we make are really just about trying to balance immediate happiness against future happiness (or minimization of unhappiness... though of course those two things are not really on the same scale since its quite possible to feel both of the emotions at the same time derived from the same "source")

What then did I get out of all those choices other than simply to reinforce me being Me?

... in progress :)

Watershed

End of another year, so time for a bit of an update for anyone who still checks in on my blog...
I haven't been posting anything for quite a while because nothing of note has been happening in my world.
Last post I made covered what Id been doing with my summer off... I didn't really choose to take the summer off but there was no contract work available so it was a more or less compulsory vacation.

I was anticipating going back to work on a planned new contract in about mid-August but a couple of weeks before I was due to resume work, the company called and let me know that they no-longer needed my services... and I wasn't the only one... They had a big ":restructuring" (as these things are called these days) and they were letting go about 150 full-time employees as well as all the contractors.
That was a bit of a bummer for me but I'm sure it was a lot worse for the other people they fired.
And so I was at a bit of a loose end...

But then a few weeks later it turned out that I got another call from the company saying they were interested in my services again... They had come across a significant issue one of their released products and had no spare people to allocate to the investigation (they just fired a bunch of "excess people"... Anyway, it was a product I had worked on before and was well qualified to do the work, so a new contract was signed and I went back to work more or less exactly on the schedule I had initially signed up for.
And the work went along pretty well (it was quite interesting debug work) and it expanded a little into another product (that used the same design and so had the same issue) and it ended up taking a couple of more months to deal with... And then there was a new issue on a different project and since I was already there and on contract, they decided to keep using me for a bit longer and that took another month or so and all in all I ended up working through till mid December... which was great from my point of view.
But now the issues are down to where they can meet schedules with their full-time staff so Ive finished up for the year.

...And it may be that that's the end of the line so to speak for contracts there...
The industry is "consolidating" it seems and over the last three months or so the company that I was contracting to has been the subject of a bit of a bidding war. And it seems that the company will now definitely be bought (the deal is scheduled to close in about a month or so).
And the company that is doing the buying will definitely be looking to realize a great deal of "synergies"... which is the currently in vogue euphemism for making lots of cuts in projects and employees!  And while a lot of cutting will of course be directed toward administrative and logistics functions that the new parent company already had and knows what they are doing (so why duplicate those functions), there will also likely be changes in the business directions and the particular engineering projects that Ive been working on may well not have a future with the new company and so my services may no-longer be required even temporarily...

... But its been a good run while it lasted and I'm glad I got to work in this contracting role for as long as I did. I think it was about eight years all told, and I spent about three of those years riding around several continents on my motorbike which I cant imagine having been able to do with any other form of employment (for my skill set anyway).

Now I don't have any real idea of what the new parent company's policy toward scalable work-force is and it is possible that there would be future contract possibilities with them, but I should assume that the "good ol days" of reliable contract work are probably over for me and I'm now going to have to find a regular job of some sort...
And that is I admit a bit of a daunting prospect... There's lots of work for young software people these days but its not easy finding a new job for a fifty year old electrical engineer with a hardware back-ground... I may well have to change field altogether but I'm gonna take the next month off over Christmas before I start looking seriously.

But it may well be one of those watershed moments when our lives take new directions that we would otherwise never have predicted... We shall see :)