Losing a Co-Worker

Several years ago I had a very enthusiastic person join our organization.  He clearly had incredible intelligence, drive, and an almost manic need to learn/apply technology.  The more I was willing to share, the more he would consume my time.  While this can always be a problem when done to excess, he also was very aware and very thankful of me allowing him to consume my time/knowledge when I had availability.

He passed away just over a year ago in his 30's.  Cancer.  Brutal, sudden, and without notice.  I only became aware of it because I had emailed and texted him a few times over several months and finally his mother answered a text and informed me.

EJ posted a comment here on my blog two years ago. I had this comment in my moderation folder for years and finally just let it through.  It of course has his personal email and such (which is why I didn't share it originally), but something about that message sitting in my inbox for all these years kept nagging at me and I finally published it.

A bit About EJ

To say that EJ and I were friends is an overstatement.  

He was one of many people I've helped inside and outside of my organization with this specific technology (and many many before that).  I tend to go out and learn new technology so that I can teach and help others, so it is a common pattern for me personally.  But he was someone who clearly had a fire in him and was driven to learn so he could apply his knowledge to help patients.  He was HUNGRY and it is always enjoyable to teach someone who desperately wants to learn.

But let me clarify that, because I think we've also all encountered people who are "hungry" in different ways over the years.  He wasn't looking for advancement, or attention, or power, he was really and desperately, looking to help patients.  He recognized in some odd way that we all have limited time on this planet and our likely enduring legacy is only the people we leave behind and the things we have done for them.  It is heart-achingly sad to see that someone who had focused his drive into helping people wind up losing his life so soon.  

He didn't know he was sick or that he was dying.  He was someone w/ some hyperactive/ADD-style drive that directed ALL OF THIS, into understanding data, researching, and guiding others to help patients.  He had a PhD, but I only knew about it because I tracked down his LinkedIn when I was trying to contact him after he'd passed.  He expressed no ego or demanding of recognition, despite being someone who truly gave of themselves in pursuit of his work.

He and I did meet up to talk once after he'd left our organization (which I will update in 15 years after I leave my current employer in compliance with our "social media policy").  The situation of him no longer being able to truly put his efforts into the health of patients was painful to such a degree that he started to tear up when he discussed it with me.  Such pain and frustration couldn't be cured with a hug, but I am glad I gave him one as we finally wrapped up when the restaurant closed.  

He cared.  He worked hard.  Many people will have the slightest nudge of a  better life because of the work he did.  But he also is gone.

What is the Point?

I write all of this down because...I have no idea.  

I am not sick, I am not dying (any more than I was yesterday or 56 years ago).  My life is great and while  the environment, my country, my state, and the tech industry (and people's understanding of reality) burns, I get to work in a place where my daily efforts are respected and benefit people who save the lives of others each day.  I have a wonderful wife, home, grown children, pets, grandchild on the way, and an actual retirement plan.  However, this is just a reflective moment on not just technology, but people and a long career in many industries and tech stacks.

At some point, all of us will no longer be here.  Our work will remain for some brief period, but ultimately, everything we've built will be gone.  Even those we've helped along the way will also pass.  The ripples of the impact of our lives will fade away into the distance until the waters of the universe grown still once again.  It can feel meaningless and empty depending upon one's mood.

I also don't think that such feelings are specifically wrong.  Life is meaningless.  

Unless we give it meaning.

The stupid Microsoft Power Platform (that this blog is essentially about), is just one of many dumb, limited, frustrating, garbage tech stacks that I've worked in during my long career.  A tech stack that has mostly been used to create useful, helpful, enjoyable, and beneficial applications for my coworkers.  A tech stack that has allowed me to express some part of my own personality here for the world.  To teach, share, and guide all of you toward a destination.

I don't believe any of your are going to save the world with this platform.  Microsoft's license to do that would be so large that the world would die anyway.  However, I do believe that you can learn and apply this technology to make the world around you a little better.  

I believe that you can choose to use this technology to help pay for your home.  That you can choose to then use that money and goodwill from others to benefit your community.  That you can choose to apply some part of your life toward building things up instead of tearing things down. However, when you must tear things down, you can still choose to put even more effort into rebuilding something better.

If there is any point to any of this, it is because we decided to apply one.  And I would submit to each of you that a part of my own hidden EULA and User Agreement I tricked you into auto-signing by reading this, that you need to find the meaning of it all and apply it whenever and wherever possible.

Where Do We Go Next?

No, I'm not meaning any kind of afterlife or whatnot.  I think we should live our lives as if this is all we get.  How you interpret that phrase though is probably how you'd be judged in any afterlife that might exist.

This is mainly a question of where do we go when we lose someone who is a part of our team, our life, and our close family.  How do we keep going?  

I think that's mainly a question that contains the answer.  We simply keep going.  How we keep going is again something that some entity or entities outside ourselves will ultimately judge.

Over the years, I've invested time in and benefitted from a great many tech stacks.  Oddly enough, I've also done the same with friends, family, and even spouses (although I think I'll stop here).  There are cycles to our lives as there is to tech.  How we recognize and respond to these cycles is an important part of our own growth.  

Spotting the moment when our friends are drifting apart is one thing, but also recognizing when and if we should act to restore it is another.  Yet again, how we choose to ignore/restore that connection is also a new phase of growth for us.  The more we get to experience in people, life, and the world around us, the better we can become at recognizing when it is time to hold on and when it is time to let go.  Finally, the better we get at this, the better we get at ACTUALLY DOING SO.

Life, relationships, and technology takes work for us to connect with any of it.  There are things we have to do in order to maintain our connections and benefit from them.  The "honeymoon period" of any phase of life definitely exists.  The more of these you go through and the more you learn how to continue beyond them, the more you grow as a person.

While interpersonal relationships are obviously things that should be mutual and should involve near equal distribution of effort toward a unified goal, work relationships are notably less so, and technology stacks even less again.  This doesn't mean they don't have similar equations to each other, but the weight of each variable are significantly different.  

When we lose a work relationship, by choice or merely through entropy, it is easy to throw one's self into more work to compensate.  I certainly seemed to date a lot of women when I was single in my 30's for a brief period, so I'll just say that this seems to align even in personal relationships.  When I abandon a primary tech stack, I also seem to cast widely to look at an array of technologies to see "what's out there" before committing to something new.  Throwing yourself back into the ecosystem of life after a loss does seem like a normal response.  Reflection on the loss or the ending is natural, but so is strapping on your big-boy pants and moving on with life.

However, I also believe there will eventually come an end-point to it all for us.  When we've worked "enough", when we've learned "enough", when we've loved "enough", and that we're finding ourselves just...tired.  

I don't think being tired means the end for any of us though.  It simply means we are tired.  We need to recover.  We might still be up for yet another run at another cycle of interest, engagement, honeymoon period, hard work, and completion.  I think we do slow down with age in some respects, but I also would say that experience grants cheat codes to velocity.  I might not run around the track as fast as I used to, but I know a shortcut to get to the end since I know this track well.  

Life has made me very tired, but I am much more resilient now.  I can pick up and restart again because I know how to do it.  I've done it so very many times that is now an unconscious playbook I follow when the cycle begins anew.

But I do still think there will one day be a point where we all sit down after a loss.  Reflect.  Grieve.  Then get prepared to pick ourselves up and do it again (out of habit), but then decide:  why bother?

There is an end to our run of this life.  An end that is the only certain thing for us all.  At some point I won't learn another tech stack.  I won't build a new work relationship.  I won't want a new partner to spend my life with.  I will simply...stop.

I honestly don't think that is anywhere close for me mentally, but I've been promised a bus is going to run over me for decades now, so maybe any minute.  EJ certainly wasn't expecting his trip to be as short as it was, but it did end, as it must.

Giving it Meaning

If it all ends, then what does it all mean?  Again, it means what meaning we apply to it. And I definitely believe you should apply meaning to your life. I might just be some rando on the internet but I will judge you harshly if you do not.

But let's be clear, I'm not talking about the stupid "Gallop poll" question of if you have a "best friend at work" kind of meaning.  That's a capitalist MBA's view of statistically correlating performance meaning.  We're talking about if what parts of your life mean something to you and become important if not precious.

No relationship, workplace, or tech stack is perfect, which is a reflection of life, which also is definitely not perfect.  However, we have to find the ways to give a positive meaning to these things for ourselves 

Life isn't so much circular or cyclical as it is a sine wave.  You're travelling along the X axis, but it sure seems like you've been to this spot on the Y axis before. This definitely can feel like you're just going to do the same old sh1t today as yesterday so blah blah blah <punches the clock>.

Finding work, jobs, tech, co-workers, friends, family members, and life partners that help us connect with meaning is not exactly easy, but it does happen.  The odds that none of those or all of those will be aligned is pretty low, so we're all dealing w/ some kind of disconnect of meaning somewhere in our lives.

Deciding when to leave a job, an organization, a career, a friend, a lover, a partner, even a family member is a part of us recognizing that these things no longer have meaning for us that they once did.  I still would love to go back and be a camp counselor instead of designing systems for a living.  However, I gave up some aspect of that simple and direct meaning (helping kids grow/learn while having fun), in trade for other kinds of meaning (being able to afford to retire while also helping other vulnerable people - including kids).

People sometimes say to never do "a job" only for the money.  But there are points in one's life where meaning must be found elsewhere.  People with failing relationships often throw themselves into work.  Sometimes we find meaning in other ways when one aspect is faltering.  What I would point out is that us sacrificing meaning in our work is intended to grant us room to build/find meaning elsewhere else.

What is important is that these are all choices, and we get to choose what gives meaning to us.  Even if sometimes that choice is a bad one.  

Wrap it up Man

This really is just me thinking about EJ a bit this morning and recognizing that he simply disappeared.  I asked his family if they took his dog, but they never answered.  He's just a little unknown now in an equation that I knew reasonably well, but wouldn't have minded to know better.  One of many kindred spirits I have encountered over the years that I wouldn't mind being friends with, but rarely risk, simply due to the complexities of workplace friendships.  I just find it easier to be friendly but not friends with coworkers.

But sometimes, I think the risk is worth it.  

We always can choose to make a connection.  To give it meaning.  

We can also choose not to.

It is important for us to commit some parts of who we are to what we are doing each day.  That also means it is important for us to make connections and grant meaning to those connections.  At some point, it just won't be as important perhaps as a nice comfy chair, a cup of hot cocoa, and a good book.  At some point, we also will want to get out of that chair and do something different, to reconnect.

However, ultimately, there will come a day when we won't leave that chair on our own.

I hope you all get to do this process over and over in your lives.  I hope you all get many opportunities to find meaning in your day.  

Speaking of, I've been meaning to...