KlausKommoss
Another adventure - a long time ago
I truly enjoyed my very short but intense engineering career. However, I had already started it with secret reservations and the serious intention to not let it be more than a game. A game of playing and experimenting with the demands of society, to feel out all these strange things like social identity, social status, social success, the countless rules people live by or think they have to live by. A game; not so much to figure out how I could fit in into this society, but investigating what these rules really are, who is making them, and if there is actually anyone enforcing them.
As a boy, dreaming of a wonderful purpose of my life and feeling the apparently so uniquely masculine fascination with problem solving in general and with science, physics, and machines in particular, I was convinced that science was the real search for truth. And if there was anyone who had the necessary pragmatism, the deeply humane common sense to apply science in order to save the world, it were engineers. I saw science as truth and engineering as an act of love and service. I thought of engineers as the ones who not only understood things but also could make things. I thought that real scientists and engineers would never sell out such ideals to “The System”, to corporations, to profane inferior standards like profit, and if they had to, in order to make a living, they would be utterly unhappy. It soon became clear that the real world is far more complex, but I still always resisted to conform.
In my first (and last, and only) job, when it seemed I was just sailing along so effortlessly having a ball, I felt the tentacles of the gigantic octopus reach out for me, the nameless, faceless “System”, ready to devour and digest me. It would use my energy to grow stronger and stronger itself throughout my life, without ever consulting me, while I grew older and weaker until, in the end, it would simply excrete me and find another virgin soul full of energy to take my place and do the same thing all over again.
This System has its very own goals, entirely independent of us and often mercilessly opposed to our wellbeing. It is by no means a physical entity or a person, anything tangible at all, and yet it seems to rule our lives more than anything else as it consists of us, as it is what we are when we forget our true identity and confuse it with the forever doomed sensation of Self.
I designed cassette playing mechanisms for car radios. These little machines actually played a role for a while in one generation of people on this world. But I thought it was just a game. I made my move, then, after only a few years, in spite of all the success still young and green behind my ears and resigned for good; determined to live on my own terms. This was 25 years ago, a short episode, a moment at a crossroads. Today it’s just a great story, a way too long caption under a picture.
Another adventure - a long time ago
I truly enjoyed my very short but intense engineering career. However, I had already started it with secret reservations and the serious intention to not let it be more than a game. A game of playing and experimenting with the demands of society, to feel out all these strange things like social identity, social status, social success, the countless rules people live by or think they have to live by. A game; not so much to figure out how I could fit in into this society, but investigating what these rules really are, who is making them, and if there is actually anyone enforcing them.
As a boy, dreaming of a wonderful purpose of my life and feeling the apparently so uniquely masculine fascination with problem solving in general and with science, physics, and machines in particular, I was convinced that science was the real search for truth. And if there was anyone who had the necessary pragmatism, the deeply humane common sense to apply science in order to save the world, it were engineers. I saw science as truth and engineering as an act of love and service. I thought of engineers as the ones who not only understood things but also could make things. I thought that real scientists and engineers would never sell out such ideals to “The System”, to corporations, to profane inferior standards like profit, and if they had to, in order to make a living, they would be utterly unhappy. It soon became clear that the real world is far more complex, but I still always resisted to conform.
In my first (and last, and only) job, when it seemed I was just sailing along so effortlessly having a ball, I felt the tentacles of the gigantic octopus reach out for me, the nameless, faceless “System”, ready to devour and digest me. It would use my energy to grow stronger and stronger itself throughout my life, without ever consulting me, while I grew older and weaker until, in the end, it would simply excrete me and find another virgin soul full of energy to take my place and do the same thing all over again.
This System has its very own goals, entirely independent of us and often mercilessly opposed to our wellbeing. It is by no means a physical entity or a person, anything tangible at all, and yet it seems to rule our lives more than anything else as it consists of us, as it is what we are when we forget our true identity and confuse it with the forever doomed sensation of Self.
I designed cassette playing mechanisms for car radios. These little machines actually played a role for a while in one generation of people on this world. But I thought it was just a game. I made my move, then, after only a few years, in spite of all the success still young and green behind my ears and resigned for good; determined to live on my own terms. This was 25 years ago, a short episode, a moment at a crossroads. Today it’s just a great story, a way too long caption under a picture.