Every Waking Moment
Most of us feel some confusion about how to organize our lives. What do we value, and why? What kind of actions do we need to take, and when? I certainly felt this confusion as a teenager, and my actions were wandering randomly between athletic, social, school and family centers of attention. My sense of values were mostly focused on concerns about my own interests, and yet morality, as far as I could identify the meaning of the term, was vaguely centered on the concept of helping others. The intersection of these personal goals, vague as they were, and moral concerns, was minimal. The lack of congruence between these confused me. I spent most of my time on personal interests, and yet, strangely enough, these were not connected to a sense of moral orientation. The moral activities, like community programs with the Boy Scouts were few and far between. I needed some clarity in my thought; without this clarity, I was not making strong progress in any particular direction.
For myself, this changed when I read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. At first reading, I did not understand the ideas very well, but I did get a strong image of inventors and business people working hard and creating new products, new companies, and interacting together to create a vibrant system of growth and accomplishment. I decided that this vision was very attractive to myself, and also very surprising. The simple idea that ‘work is good’ was an epiphany for me.
I looked at myself in the mirror, while brushing my teeth, and I thought ‘wow, you are not very much like any of those productive heroes in the book.’ But I shrugged, and told myself that I had no idea of these possibilities before. I resolved to improve.
So, I started to work, at my studies, and to think about what kind of career I would like. I wanted to be a scientist, and an inventor, and create new technologies and products, and feel the pleasure of creating. I started to actually read my text books prior to doing the homework exercises. Wow, what a difference that made, suddenly the ideas became clear. My grades improved, and to my surprise I was soon a student at Yale University, studying chemistry and biochemistry…and philosophy.
I wanted to know more about why ‘work is good’, I wanted to be able to validate this idea to myself, to bring more clarity to my understanding of my chosen path in life. It was a long journey to find this understanding, at least 15 years, and continuing across a lifetime of 50 years of work.
This website provides access to the ideas I encountered, and how these ideas can be integrated into a whole, providing clarity to the confusing choices and situations that are all around us in our lives.
These ideas worked for me. After graduation from Yale with a BS in Chemistry, I achieved a PhD in Chemistry from MIT. I have worked in research and development related to the processing of semiconductor devices with a major computing company for 41 years. Most of the projects I worked on have been implemented in products covering the whole range of computing from mainframe servers to desktop computers, cell phones and communication equipment. It has been an exciting and rewarding career, and I have no desire to retire. Each day and week and year brings an upward spiral of accomplishment with a satisfaction that both feeds on itself and yet is never satisfied. There is always a desire for more.
This lifetime of activity started with three little words, ‘work is good’, and an image from a book showing an ideal of human creativity.
I hope others can also find some clarity, in their own lives, from the information on this website. In Every Waking Moment we face moral questions, about how we should focus our mind, what goals we should pursue, and how we should pursue them. We need our best effort if we are to find a path forward.