stuck at work on a sunny sunday afternoon working on a flakey mail server and dreaming of being free of such cares...

Being stuck at the office on a sunny Sunday really makes me wonder about what I want to be doing. Do I really want to be working jobs that have me working on the weekends because I'm the only one who can fix things? Do I really care if some executive schmoe can't get his email for a few hours?

No, absolutely not, and I never have. I can motivate myself from a problem solving point of view for a while, but when the big projects run dry and I'm left with small stuff or general maintenance, I lose interest and get antsy in my job. So, I switch jobs into a more technically challenging environment, till I clean that up and get bored with it, and the beat goes on. This is what drove me from the tech world to teaching last time. The truth is that I think that my job is just stupid and relatively meaningless. In a world of beauty, horror, and confusion, I work on websites, firewalls, load balancers, and mail servers. If I do a good job it means someone gets to send their email or our website stays up. So what? Are these things I care about? Does these things mean anything in the large scheme of things? No. So why spend the years of my youth doing this when I could be on the beach in Hawaii windsurfing everyday??? Finding my own nirvana in the sunshine and waves...

A friend of mine is taking a 6 month leave of absence from the company he co-owns to start a kite-surfing company in Brazil. That is like a dream to me - leave behind all these things that hinder my mind, body, and spirit, and go be in nature for 6 months doing something you love.

I've had this dilemma for a long time. I know that I can do a good job of running a network and at times make a fair amount of money for doing so, but do I really want to? It usually comes down to no. Which leaves me searching, seeking, questioning where I go from here... So again I wonder, why am I spending my youth in largely unforfilling jobs that shackle me? One thing is clear, I either need to make a break from the capitalist system for a while or become fully assimilated because this in between stuff doesn't work well for me. Who knows? I sure don't...