This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0].
When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that we can externally measurable as to whether they were great or not.
I think it’s fantastic they this man’s passion is Soylent cat food hybrids for human consumption. He worked all those years and finally broke free for his passion.
The concept of life as meaningless, to be happy with the drudgery, or repetition, instead to be happy with the 'journey', to be in each moment.
Very common throughout literature/history.
I'd like to think we are somehow different, that modern man with technology is reaching some new level, to find some purpose. But now, not so sure, it's still just day-in-day-out, then you die.
That sounds like a well above average life. No problems and a functional member of society in every respect? Good relationships? Five children?!
It seems obvious this guy was in fact happy, despite the last lines of the poem, or else he would have acted out at work, become an alcoholic, divorced, or whatever. That or a supreme stoic.
When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that we can externally measurable as to whether they were great or not.
I think it’s fantastic they this man’s passion is Soylent cat food hybrids for human consumption. He worked all those years and finally broke free for his passion.
[0] https://poets.org/poem/unknown-citizen