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Identity Stack

4 min read ·

In the technology world, specifically software development, we have this idea of a technology stack, they are the tools a professional is comfortable working with or a company uses to build their products. Usually, your stack will grow as you go to more senior positions, and you will need to learn about things that were initially outside of your scope like containerization, CI/CD, and cloud providers. As you have to learn these tools, that are outside of your “main job”, you will feel if they are something that you want to explore more of or just learn the basics to fulfill your work demands. Eventually, you will have learned enough of those that you start to think maybe I should add x to my resume, or even change to a job where you will get to use them more often. That’s how your work personality, aka your career, gets built, it’s (mostly) not a strict path that you pick, **but something you adjust and tweak along the way.

Some advice on picking your tech stack always gets repeated, and I will not go through them, but there is one that helps you get to the correct headspace, think of your stack as you think about your investment portfolio. So, Investments 101, do your research and buy shares of companies you believe in, don’t be too conservative, and lower your risks by diversifying. What does this mean in a work scenario? Well, try not to get too invested in frameworks you don’t see succeeding, and make a few bets on early-stage tech that looks promising and conciliate that with being a specialist in the mature and boring tech that will help you pay your bills.

Now, I like to think about how we build our identities the same way. We are very interested in a few topics, and much less in other ones. You may think that you are interested in a lot of different things, if so I advise you to take a look into how you manage your time in those interests, it will help visualize what you actually care for. Saying for myself, if I had 100 time/identity units, I’d separate them into roughly two groups, small (5-15) and large (20-30). Technology and entrepreneurship are the large ones and cinema, music, anime, and gym would be the smaller ones. That’s not to say I don’t try to learn or slack with the things that are not top of the list, but if I need to choose between putting an hour in the gym or my company, I’d pick the latter, any day.

Where am I getting with this? Using this finite lens to look at your identity may help you see if you are making poor decisions in how you invest your time. Is your job too much of your identity? If you take it out, is there anything left? There should be. In the same way that if you want a job at a company you will need to learn their tech stack, does your identity align with who you want to be in the future? Are you spreading yourself too thin between multiple subjects and not really getting to the bottom of any of them? How will your changing identity affect the people who are currently in your life? Will they still be a part of it?

I’d like to make this some sort of wake-up call to whoever is living life on standby mode, or just living by whatever someone told them was the right way without reviewing if they actually believe in it. Embrace the fluid nature of your identity, if you didn’t like who you were yesterday, you can be someone else today. I try not to use adjectives when describing myself, but I’m a huge believer in people’s potential, and that everyone (including me) is severely downplaying themselves, you could call me an accelerationist. In some way, I believe all of this ties up to who we interact with and what social circles are we in, but that idea is not yet crisp enough for me to put into this text.

What I learned this week

Bioimpedance machines work by showing a electrical charge through you (in your hands) and seeing how it gets back (in your feet), because different tissues have different resistance

In psychiatry, there is this term, egosyntonic, that refers to the things in our life we deeply associate with ourselves, like thinking your job is part of you, and I tried to mention it somewhere in this essay but couldn’t make it a non-cringy way. I may cover it again when I’m a better writer.