When I moved to Chapel Hill, I went to career therapy. Career therapy is when you are so deeply depressed that you start going to counseling to deal with it. In counseling, you answer the therapist’s questions and establish that your relationship is great, your family is just fine, you don’t have any past trauma, etc., etc., but it turns out you get something like 99% of your life satisfaction from your work. (This was a little while after Next Island went under, and realizing that I get my life satisfaction from my work shortly after our entire staff was laid off with no notice wasn’t the greatest revelation for me.)
In career therapy, I made a list of what I wanted in my new work, and I recently found a gig that has 5 out of 5 things. But I’m discovering, as I do it, that it’s not a silver bullet. Or rather, I do want those 5 things, I want job security and name recognition and the rest of what I said, but I failed to include other attributes with a stronger effect on my happiness and satisfaction. So I’m not entirely happy there.
Meanwhile, I went to an event in Raleigh for local devs, and it was just great! I guess I didn’t realize how many people I actually know here, and all the great things they’re doing, and I got to introduce interesting people to each other, and a friend from the indie meetup came and said he only knew about this event and felt welcome attending because of me, and some other people came up and introduced themselves and knew my name and my work. And overall, I just felt so much love for this area and the community here!
And hating this location is pretty much why I thought I was in counseling.
So I think I’m a pretty poor judge of what will make me happy.
