What is my deed worth???

(*This may come across as a rant. If , like me, you too have very little tolerance for that kind of writing, kindly skip the post.)

One thought is using up a lot of my processing power these days. I keep thinking if I have wasted the first 25 years of my life and if what I have done so far is meaningful. To sum up the all these years, I have gone to school, earned an engineering graduate degree (which did not need 80% of what I learnt in school), worked for a couple of years as a software engineer (which did not need 100% of what I learnt in engineering), went to a B-School for my post-graduation (no engineering skills + no skill from the work experience needed), interned in an automobile group (which did not even need me going to the office) and landed up in an equity research job (which needs no engineering knowledge, but uses a little bit of what I learnt in the B School). So I have clearly run from pillar to post, searching for something I could not identify all these years.

The saddest part is I have not identified it even now. In the school days, I never was exceptionally interested in any particular subject. My interest in a subject during a year depended largely on the teachers. But when I was learning a few subjects (only a few!) in my engineering (Electrical machines, Power Electronics, Power System Analysis etc) I thought I had found my calling. I enjoyed these immensely and looked forward to the classes and the labs. While probably the right thing to do then was to take up a job in one of these fields, I was struck by the MBA Cupid and threw away my final year, when I could have done a useful project somewhere. To aid the so called MBA preparation, (basically going back to my school syllabus during my final year B.Tech!), I took up the first job on campus (a software company).

Again random learning there. Some ancient programming language, which was invented probably around the same time as valves was imposed upon me. I learnt the basics of that and SQL and became quite comfortable with my work and thought I was cut out only for that. MBA admission came knocking and once more left my terrain to enter a new one. And what I am doing after all this too does not evince much interest in me!! I am left high and dry and often wonder if learning itself is over valued. Most of what we learn is pretty useless for day-to-day-life or for work. Then why learn at all?? Learning is held at such a high esteem everywhere with companies stressing on continuous learning and what not, whereas in reality, our learning is limited to collecting an assortment of information with no use whatsoever. For example, I know mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and how endocrine system is different from exocrine. So what?? Who cares? The next time something is wrong with my endocrine system, I need to consult a specialist who probably struggled in his school to do time-distance and geometry problems. Similarly I know how electric power is transmitted. Big deal! How does it matter as long as I cant do anything about the line losses? And how does knowing about it change anything I do?

The common explanation I get is we need to get exposed to all the fields, to be able to judge where my interest lies. Nothing can be farther from truth. Ok, after all these experimentation, I say my interest lies in agriculture research. What can I do about it?? I feel like Edison, having found 999 careers that don't interest me. But what is the recourse available??

I feel claustrophobic thinking. I feel my job is inherently meaningless. To me, today, the only criterion that defines meaningfulness of a career is what happens if I succeed/fail in the objective of my job. If I succeed, someone makes a couple of more millions, I fail and they lose a couple of millions. This is not something I care about. This is not something that I envisaged for myself. My definition may change, but, this is definitely not something that brings out the best in me. The worst part is more than 90% of the jobs I see around me are of similar nature. They have no bearing on anything material to human life or just life in general. If I jump from here, that would be mostly to land in one of those 90% jobs.

I know everyone gets into this Jerry Mcguire-ish situation, esp in the mid twenties. But the effect of this quarter life crisis is largely under-estimated and absolutely under-expressed. I am robbed of the interest to read/try anything new. A big "Why this?" flashes in my mind every-single-time I think of anything.

Help me do anything worth doing. Ideas invited! But please, no learning new things like dance, art and blah for the sake of over-rated learning. Also, do let me know how you are coping with your quarter-life crisis (Assuming you are single, otherwise, quarter life crisis would have been too-minor-a-distraction for you to have noticed!!)