At 18 years old we are asked “what do you want to do with your life?”, I was still working with that. We graduate college and we ask ourselves, “what do we do now with my life?”, I still had more to learn. After returning from the Peace Corps most volunteers ask themselves “what have I done with my life?!”, and for once I had an answer that resonated. I had found myself.
After trying out the healthcare industry, and trying out altruistic agriculture in subsistence farming village, I had come home playing catch up and will maintain the hunger of an underdog well into my 30s. Now I have a goal, now I have a strategy. What I lacked in my early 20s wasn’t heart, or grit, or even intelligence (despite what public schooling and standardized tests taught me to believe), I lacked a clear strategy because I didn’t see all the pieces.
At a crucial time in my life, I came across 80,000 Hours. 80,000 hours is the amount of time the average person spends dedicated to their career, it is also a child organisation of The Centre for Effective Altruism focused on career guidance. This is the preventative medicine of career sites. There is no magic quiz that sorts you into a categorical job caste system, no assumed correlations between skills and propensities. Rather, this site exacts a heavy ask, for you to spend hours getting to know yourself and the current state of the world. What it gives you in return, a measure of what kind of role you want your job to play in your life and how much good you aim to do with either by direct in-demand work or by cash donations – and how best to do both.
Finding this site was the last piece in the puzzle for me. I had been fascinated by tech since coming back to America from a relatively low-tech existence for 2 and ½ years in Nepal and SE Asia and was considering a software dev bootcamp when I read something that changed my world. “There are less than 100 people with the official title of working on the AI alignment problem” Using computers, solving problems, being creative, developing new ways of thinking, asking insightful questions. These are things that 12 year old Mark did and for a time, society, my peers, my supposed friends all tried to get me to forget that, to try out something different and that’s when I lost the reins to my life, joined the peace corps after considering being a special operations search and rescue pararescue because I was stuck at the bottom of a well that i had to do something drastic to get out
For a time i felt out of control - getting back to tech helps me feel in control again. Building a future worth living in is the best way to make that future come true. I say back, but really I never left, I just didn’t know it. My earliest memory of computers was installing mario’s game gallery in 1995 because my dad (who was an accomplished programmer in his own right) was too busy working through my childhood to do it for me. So before I was 10 I was comfortable navigating the file system on our windows systems and has a taste for the troubleshooting process. Somewhere I forgot. But I’m back, I’m ready to contribute because I believe that our creations will save us. What shall I create? >_