I find it very easy to get into a smooth flow of daily activities and lose sight of the bigger picture. It is like I’m slowly falling asleep and living in a doze. Once every couple of months something nudges me and I wake up for a moment, and realise that I had fallen asleep again.

About half a year ago, I wrote the following (this was Before the Blog so it’s an excerpt from a long offline cogitation):

I have reviewed my life before, both long-term and short-term, but recently (last 6 months or so) I’ve done less and less of it, and cruised on auto-pilot. I need to provide myself with discipline and structure, if I want to stay moving and stay on track.
I spend a lot of time on things that are ultimately not important, and very little doing things that are really important.
If I did nothing more with my life than this, I would look back at it with regret.

Re-reading this a week ago, I was disappointed to see that I was exactly in the same place now as then.

I’m not a big believer in goals – goals can only take you to places you already know. But I do believe in moving, in having direction and momentum. There’s always time to tweak the direction later, but if there is no movement then there’s no chance of getting anywhere at all. (Unless a big flying saucer suddenly arrives to pick you up and deposit you somewhere else, but I’m not counting on that.)

This time around, the realisation that I had stood still for 6 months was shocking enough to get me moving for real.

One of the main things I have been dissatisfied with is my job. In a way it seems reckless and, well, presumptuous to complain about it, because it is, in itself, a very good job. (I work for an investment bank.) I’ve got good colleagues, good atmosphere, excellent pay, reasonably interesting tasks; I’m good at what I do and my work is appreciated. The only tangible shortcoming is that the hours are long.

But the main problem is that I just do not care about what I’m doing. I do not think that the job is important, in the grand scheme of things, or that the firm and even the financial industry really deserve much energy to be spent on them. While I can see that efficient financial markets play a role in the world, it’s not something that really makes a difference. Not a job I would proudly tell my grandchildren about, if you see what I mean.

The problem is that I am not sure where I would like to work instead. I know I want to move, but don’t really know in which direction.

So I’m making the first step a small one.

I intend to move from my current “financial / quantitative analyst” role into a software development role. I’ll stay in the investment banking industry, because it’ll be easier to get a new job here; I will start in Excel VBA development, but expect to gradually move on from there. Software development is a more broadly applicable skill than financial analysis, so whenever I decide to move on (which I know I will do), the next step could be a more interesting one.

It’s a step, which is good in itself as it gets me moving. It is also unlikely to lead me in a completely wrong direction so it’s not going to make things worse.

In the last few days I’ve sent my CV to a couple of recruitment firms and already gotten back a dozen job specs. This is looking promising.

I haven’t felt this excited about my life for a long time.