Engineering the Character

It has been quite some time that I've been out of work for. Some four months or so, and there seems to be no sign of a job I may be starting. I haven't had this much free time in my entire life and it's driving me crazy. Not because I have nothing to do, I actually do have many enjoyable things to do. The only problem is guilty pleasure and the lack of challenges.

My entire life has been like a training; to become what I have become - an engineer - it seems. And now that I'm there, I have no engineering to do. Or so it seems. By some definitions, there's always engineering to do. That particular definition being of a person being able to implement knowledge to design things or to make them work. This is my own version though, developed from my personal experiences and upon not finding a more suitable definition.

The world being in an economic recession and all, resulting in shortage of jobs, resulting in more people with nothing to do but think and look for new jobs, I think it's time people like me did some "inner" engineering. Understanding the details of our everyday life that so far we've taken for granted because we needed to spend time doing more important things such as earning money. You could call it engineering of the self or soul, I prefer to use the term character. I know it seems like a psychological task is on our hands, but it's just another form of analysis. We take the facts and make what we can of them, making patterns and studying different trends so we can make sense of it all in a generalized way. It's like mathematics without the equations.

It's not hard. All you have to do is notice things you wouldn't have normally noticed: the time you take in the shower every morning and if it varies depending on the days of the week, what song you heard on the way to work and the mood that it resulted in, the reaction of the coffee servers at the coffee shop you go to, the kind of lunches you chose to have depending on the date you get paid, what are the things most accessible to you in your bedroom, etc. Once you began to think about these things, you realize there may be patterns in there somewhere, then you ask yourself why those patterns exist and it just may teach you something about yourself even you didn't know. The more variant pattern will indicate things that dictate your behavior the most, hence which are closest to you, in turn establishing your priorities.

Once you start studying yourself, it seems you are studying another person whose every habit you have access to and whose character you are building based upon those habits. And if you decide you don't like this person, there comes a problem required some deeper engineering - the fixing part.