It's been 10 years since I started my first job as a software engineer. During these years, I have worked in a few different industries, and the older I get, the more often I ask myself - what's even the point? I do not see any bigger purpose in my life and my work. I feel I'm not changing anything and have almost no impact on people's lives and the world around me. I started playing around with computers at a young age, and I knew very quickly that I wanted my career to be close to computers. My whole education was aimed towards it. I was passionate about learning and experimenting with things for years. I do not really know when I lost myself. I think I got sucked into chasing things I do not really care about, money being just an example. Money is nice, money is actually necessary to some degree, but at some level, you just don't need more, but you still want them - why?

I think the following quote from "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams is pretty accurate in that regard.

"This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

I have decided that I need to make a big change and reevaluate my life and the situation I am in. Who do I want to be? What makes me happy? What do I enjoy doing? Is my ego controlling me? What is the motivation for my activities? I like learning. I actually kept learning different things for years during my free time. I have some experience in academia and research. I studied and worked abroad. I like working in an international environment, would love to learn more languages, and keep learning things that can actually be used to make the world a bit better.

I know there are many industries that can satisfy all these requirements, but I have decided to do my best to enter the Space Industry. I do not yet know how many things I'm missing to be valuable there, but I'm more excited than I have been in years when I even think about this. I have made my decision already; now I need to do the work to get there. Wish me luck!