In September of 2016, I spent two weeks in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India, helping teach the prototype of our Android course to a group of college professors. Our hosts treated us in the most welcoming, empowering way I’ve ever experienced. I felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket of human generosity. I may never have been happier.
The culture shock hit like a truck when I returned home. Within days I was back to where I had been emotionally before this trip, unable to enjoy much of anything, trapped in a life that seemed to suffocate me with daily chores and old baggage. Too much to do.Too much stuff. No way to ever catch up.
Of course, I started searching the internet. In self-determination theory, autonomy, competence, and relatedness are considered the fundamental needs that must be fulfilled towards a person’s motivation and happiness. The truth is that these do exist in my current life. So, why do I feel so trapped, incompetent, and alone?
Autonomy
My current job assignment is not what I chose for myself, but let’s face it, I can pretty much do what needs to be accomplished in any way I choose. It’s incredibly interesting, has unprecedented impact, and I look forward to going to work almost every day. Yet, after ten amazing years with the same company, I want to shift the balance, give other parts of myself room to breathe before my time expires. But I can’t. I have lived, and thus accumulated a myriad small and huge obligations and responsibilities, and stuff that I am attached to. They are like a ball and chain, diminishing my mental and physical freedom of movement.
In India, physically removed by half a turn of the globe, and 12 hours into tomorrow, I felt…unbounded.
I also realized that autonomy is not about throwing away a life that’s not broken. It’s about recognizing possibilities and giving all of them consideration, without judgement, viewing life not as a journey on a path but as floating in a big open ocean, where swimming in any direction leads to…more ocean.
Competence
I live and work in a company, in an area of the world, where you are supposed to excel at everything you undertake. It’s not good enough to do things, to do them well enough to derive joy (or income). There is a social mandate to tirelessly strive for improvement, for relentless dedication to multiple skills at a superb level. If you are a great software engineer, you must have also played Carnegie hall, performed Shakespeare on the big stage, bootstrapped a hospital project in Africa, achieved multiple black belts, run the iron man, and you mediate for an hour a day, all while also spending quality time with your partner having immersive tantric sex, and your kids, who are straight A students, teaching them advanced origami because dressing paper dolls is so not impressive.
Surrounded by all that greatness, mere competence feels like failure. I say “feels”, because competence is as much about how we relate to our skills as any objective measurement. If you can swim to shore after you fall off the dock, you are competent, even if you don’t “take it to the next level”.
I felt competent in India, because the work we’d done was welcomed, and we were respected for the skill it took to produce it. As a result, I came back motivated and determined to make this course the best ever…because I think I can. I am competent at explaining things to people using written words. I feel competent when I am writing stuff. I can’t say it like this for anything else in my life. So, to feel competent more of the time I should…write more?
Relatedness
I have a lot of colleagues and co-workers. It is in the nature of those relationships that they value what I can do for them, and so the degree of relatedness is tied to achievement. I was brought up and culturally trained in that mindset, that my value is through what I achieve, and whatever I achieve, it’s never enough. It’s a stressful and lonely place even when surrounded by people who care.
When I was in India, people just opened their hearts — the people we worked with, the students, and the dancers in the street. It was overwhelming, and intoxicating. The only expectation was that I open mine in turn. It is such an easy thing to do when you don’t need to guard against judgement and criticism.
Returned, I can now recognize people in my life that want to relate to me in this way. I think I am going to spend a lot more time with them.
Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. After returning from India, after the shock started to wear off, I chose to stay at my job, keep writing, and spend more time with my friends and family. Undramatic? Yes. But sometimes, the point of leaving is to recognize that you already have what you think you are looking for.