3 months after beginning a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering I told my supervisor to cancel my funding - I would not be returning to the lab. 1 month after my lab departure, I bought a backpack and a one-way ticket to Thailand.

Some of my friends and family were shocked, but none were more shocked than I. 6 months prior, I would have told you I was beginning my dream-degree working on robotic prosthetic arms.

What was I doing? Am I selfish? Lazy? Crazy? In this article, I hope to find out. In the process, I hope that other individuals in a similar (or dissimilar) predicament will be able to glean insight from my experience.

Source: https://blinclab.ca/

The End

It begins at the end of a degree. Staring into post-graduation abyss, I saw the only two options available (or what I perceived to be the only two options): get a mechanical engineering job or continue my education. Since I despise the rigid 9-5 program, love learning, disdain authority, and prefer knowledge to money, the choice seemed obvious: I will get a master’s degree.

I was accepted into arguably the coolest lab on campus, the Bionic Limbs for Improved Natural Control Laboratory, with intentions to develop robotic upper-limb prostheses. Such limbs have entered mainstream media for their capabilities to be controlled by the user’s mind (!) and provide sensations such as heat and pressure that feel as if they’re occurring within the person’s missing limb. The one-line description “I work on robotic arms” impresses grandparents and grandkids alike. It’s definitively cool.

So why the hell would I leave all that?

The short answer is that I understood myself on a deeper level than ever before and knew that grad school was the wrong place for me. The long answer is how I understood myself and, hopefully, how you might too.

The Beginning

2 months after beginning my Master’s degree, I had essentially made zero progress on defining my thesis. Even with free reign over my research direction, a rare and gracious opportunity bestowed upon me by my supervisor, I was getting nowhere. It was highly uncharacteristic of me.

Instead of brainstorming ideas for my biomedical engineering thesis, I was researching AI, behavioural psychology, cryptocurrencies, Jungian archetypes, religion and philosophy. I could feel something deeply misaligned within me but I could not make sense of it. All of my thesis ideas were “good” ideas but they were far too grandiose, big picture, and most importantly, almost entirely unrelated to biomedical engineering. I had to shift and narrow my scope towards prosthetic limbs but I simply couldn’t.

Attempting to gently guide me towards an achievable thesis, my supervisor suggested I write a perspective piece on the field to see where my head was at. I happily consented and promptly wrote 5000 words on the morality of building sentient AI. The paper defied my best intentions of staying on-topic, but it spilt out of me faster than I could comprehend that it was blatantly irrelevant to my thesis. I can only imagine the look on my supervisor’s face when she opened that document…

Anyway, I continued forward, assuming I would break through these distractions with enough work. In retrospect, I certainly had a breakthrough, albeit a completely disorienting one.

The Crisis

I woke up on a Friday morning and distinctly felt that my consciousness had been cleanly severed into halves and a deep psychological rift had overtaken me. (A third section of my mind existed outside of myself and laughed at how utterly hopeless and dejected I looked). My roommates can attest that I was visibly shook -- an existential crisis gripped me tightly.

I had a million questions and no answers. Each successive question burrowed deeper into my core with no signs of letting up.

What am I doing with my thesis?
Do I even like biomedical engineering?
Why am I getting a Master’s degree?
Have I decided this path for myself or is it the result of cultural programming?
What am I doing with my life and why?

The last question shook me absolutely. At the climax of my introspective investigation, I held a microscope up to my foundational values and discovered deep cracks of confusion patched with societal scotch tape. I felt completely and utterly confused, as if I had just occupied a stranger’s mind and was trying to find out what makes them tick.

I think everyone faces this question at some point: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my life? It comes to everyone in time, at various stages of their life. Anyone who denies that this question is universally important to homo sapiens has either yet to encounter, answered it implicitly, or has pushed it into the depths of their psyche and stacked vices on top. For many people, the answer is simple: God. God put me here and for that reason, I exist and mean to do good by Him. I truly envy these people because this answer is so straightforward and actionable. But if I’m honest with myself, it never satisfied me in the least. My incredulity precedes me.

Perhaps it is fate I was also deep in a learning tangent in existential philosophy at the time (or perhaps it was a catalyst). The philosopher Albert Camus’ account of the Absurd weighed heavily upon me at this moment. The Absurd, as I understand it, is the comically depressing clash between a human being’s innate desire to ascribe meaning to his existence and the fact that he is inadequate to do so. The bittersweet conclusion to the realization that there is no inherent meaning in life is that you get to decide the meaning of your life. Camus famously said that “The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”

All of my existential readings and thoughts weighed heavily upon the spine of the knife splitting my mind in two. Half of me attempted to reassure the other half that I was “on the right path and that I just need to stick through this strange, temporary phase”. The other half was screaming “abandon everything!!!”. In an effort to alleviate my split-brain, I opened up a Word document and poured a pure stream of consciousness onto digital paper. The brain-dump began:

I am interested in history, art, physics, philosophy, literature, deep cosmological questions, understanding why people are the way they are and why we act the way we act, robots, how rockets work, how the brain works, why some drugs are allowed and some are not, the role institutions play in shaping our ideologies, the role machines will play in our future, religion, science, technology, politics, culture, public speaking, conversation, writing, communicating, body language, genetics, AI! And so much more!

How do I get this position where I can simultaneously be an entrepreneur who pushes ideas and executes them, be the engineer who can actually design and build, and oversee creation of products and services while also being a public intellectual who can weigh in on the pressing issues of our time and be a voice who will speak against the loud majority when necessary. “A podcast guest”. Have a breadth of knowledge that is stretched to its limits in not one direction but an expansive sphere that continually grows in all directions. I want to write essays and books.

I am terrified by the idea of being on one path for my whole life. Specialization is my nightmare. Innovation lies in the mixing and mingling of separated schools of thought. I want to merge them all and draw from the multitude of perspectives. I want to hold contradictory perspectives. I want to challenge people and more importantly have them challenge me. I want to gain as much knowledge as possible and share as much! And hopefully gain wisdom along the way.

Herein lies the apparent root cause of my crisis: fear of specialization. I truly love learning, and learning diversely. A Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering seemed to only open doors deeper within biomedical engineering. Dedicating the rest of my life to expertise in one narrow domain terrified the living hell out of me. This was the first of my psychological revelations: I realized that I am (and strive to be) the polymathic inventor archetype.

The Polymath/Inventor

“For Inventors, big risks equals big rewards; they would much rather go for it and fail, then play it safe to only make incremental progress.” This single sentence more or less sums up my experience. Grad school represented security, incremental (menial) progress, and intellectual suffocation.

According to the Myers-Briggs personality profile, I am the ‘debater’ type (aka the inventor). I have always loved connecting the dots between disparate domains that appear unconnectable on the surface. I have a talent for summarizing dense topics and extracting the golden nuggets. I certainly lack expertise in all of these topics and I’ll be the first to admit it. And that’s totally fine with me, in fact I prefer it. I’ve never wanted to be the leading expert in X, Y, or Z. I want to connect brilliant experts and show them that we can work together to create an innovative combination of XYZ. When I realized I was fighting myself tooth-and-nail to focus on biomedical engineering while simultaneously studying other topics intensely with ease, it became clear that I was fighting my hardwired psychology and aptitudes.

When I initially doubted grad school, I felt guilty. I had the wrong perspective. When I viewed these facts from the perspective of a polymath, it made complete sense. I had milked engineering to its personal extent and had exhausted my motivation to learn in that domain. I needed new ideas that deeply puzzled and fascinated me. My yearning for adventure and affinity to bold and grandiose visions of the future began to make a lot more sense when I realized that I was partially hard-wired this way by evolution and genetics.

Reflecting on these innate psychological drives, I finally found a somewhat satisfactory answer to the meaning of life question: the meaning to your life is being what you’re meant to be. (Circular, I know, but bear with me). I believe the meaning of my life is to be the fringe inventor whose unique perspective allows innovation at the intersection of frontiers to make the world a better place for everyone.

Who are you?

Obviously, not everyone shares my psychological profile, and for good reason. Even more obviously, my answer to the ‘meaning of life’ conundrum is not going to be your answer. If the meaning of your life is being what you’re meant to be, it simply begs the question, “What am I meant to be?”. No one can tell you this, and this dumb article certainly can’t. You must define it for yourself, but I promise you that discovering who you are meant to be is far more tractable than discovering the meaning of life. It’s likely a life-long endeavour, but it can only get easier by understanding yourself.

We are not blank slates. Everyone has innate strengths and weaknesses. When people tell you to play to your strengths, they are implicitly saying to maximize your youness. Noone can be you better than you. So how can you begin to understand yourself? Studying the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and taking well-established trait-model tests such as Myers-Briggs and the Big 5. These two tests were immensely helpful for myself and cast light onto what I could feel within me but could not articulate.

Everyone has an image of the best version of themselves. That image is who you were meant to be. It doesn’t matter if you reach it, it only matters that you work towards it. You have to be yourself or die trying.

An existential crisis is your body telling you your actions are not aligned with your archetypal image. My severed consciousness was a symptom of me feeling out of place and it was mirrored in my psyche.

I highly recommend you take these psychological profiling tests and attempt to articulate the best version of yourself -- it is the lynchpin to finding your strengths and fulfilling your potential. Be who you were meant to be!

(Note: When you take the tests, be completely honest. Do not look at the personality profiles beforehand to try and ‘get’ the one you’d like to be. Lying to yourself will make your life even more confusing.)

The Practical

Beyond the psychological reasoning, leaving my degree behind made practical sense.

This is the information age, and information is widely disseminated and mostly free. I believe the previously unassailable university paradigm is going to face drastic revamping in the next 30 years and degrees simply won’t matter in the way they do now. It’s already happening - the market is saturated with bachelor’s degrees and new-grads are drowning in debt with no jobs. The future of education isn’t here yet, but it starts with online education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are already changing the game. I’m taking cryptography, game theory, and AI courses from ivy league schools for free and at my own pace.

When I asked myself if I should leverage my natural learning obsession for free or commit 2 years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars for a highly specialized education, the choice became obvious. At this pivotal point in my life, I concluded that it was wisest to cast the widest net possible rather than double down on a major I chose as a child. Instead of forcing myself to specialize in biomedical engineering, I could let my natural obsession for learning take hold and guide me.

So, why Thailand? The practical answer is simple arithmetic. $2 in Canada buys me a donut. $2 in Thailand buys me a heaping pad thai. I can subsist on my savings for a lot longer in Southeast Asia while I undergo a massive learning transformation and move towards a self-actualized career.

The Spiritual - Chaos & Order

While I was busily distracting myself from school, I was educating myself on a set of ideas that formed a powerful mental model. I am not a religious person, and hardly a spiritual one. But the more I studied my own psychology, the more I brushed up against mythology and a pervasive common thread: Chaos and Order. The Known and Unknown. Yin and Yang.

We navigate the fine line between chaos and order in what can be modeled as the Hero’s Journey. Pick your favourite story, Hercules or Harry Potter, for example, and see how it maps on to the monomyth depicted below.

It might seem strange to apply a mythical plot to your own life, but once you start seeing it, you see it everywhere. It’s an incredibly powerful perspective for making sense of your world and where you are within it.

My life has been overwhelmingly orderly. This may be a better state than overwhelmingly chaotic, but a purely ordered life is mind-numbingly boring. For the past 5 years, I had a strict engineering timetable that left little room for creativity. Grad school offered a higher level of creativity, but it was still contained within the highly specialized subset of an already distinct discipline within a category of STEM inside a university institution within… You get the idea. It’s ordered turtles all the way down.

I believe that true greatness and the most meaningful human achievements have spawned in the depths of chaos. Chaos is an incredibly volatile existence with extreme potential. There is probably much more potential for failure than success.

Order is comfortable. Chaos is unknown.

Growing up in a stable, upper-middle class family, my life was pretty easy. As I graduated and fully felt I was entering ‘adulthood’, I saw nothing but comfortable routine in my path and it terrified the living hell out of me. I yearned for adventure, for a journey. Every day I could feel the shackles of normalcy getting a little tighter, a little more constricted. Every. Single. Day. Until the climactic consciousness split consummated with an existential crisis.

Moving to Asia with no plans whatsoever represented a complete oscillation from order to chaos that I desperately needed. At first, I was embarrassed. It takes a seriously whiny and entitled white kid to say “my life is so good that I need to go on a vacation because I’m bored”. But truthfully, that’s not it. Asia represented much more of a metaphorical chaos than a literal one. An opportunity to step into the unknown, both physically and mentally.

It’s difficult to describe the deep level of yearning for adventure that I harboured. It was as if a deep-seated ball of fire had consumed my psyche. Once it caught hold of me, it would not let go. Every fibre of my ego was being stretched to wit’s end. Something had to change. I accepted it.

Most people hate change. I’ve come to love it more each day because it represents an opportunity to learn. When faced with the choice to stay on the traditional academic course or a complete upheaval of my life, the decision was almost too easy.

Perhaps it is a grand mistake to attempt to manufacture chaos and thrust myself into it. I suppose I’ll find out.

Where am I now?

After 1.5 months of rejuvenating family time and 2.5 months of travelling through Asia, I couldn’t be more excited for the future. Once I have fulfilled my adventure quota -- only God knows when -- I will find a lovely place to exist that is cheap to subsist. I will place undivided attention on learning my current fascinations (AI and crypto) at a deep level, complemented with refreshers on my past obsessions and exploratory tangents through the obscurest corners of wikipedia. The intellectual freedom is purifying.

It’s hard to say where I’ll go from here, that’s the tricky part about diving into chaos. I’m trusting my love of learning and crave for creation to guide me in the right direction. Immense opportunity is on the horizon -- and none of it requires a graduate degree.

What do I recommend to you?

And this is what I’d advise to grad students: if you aren’t seriously bothered and captivated by the problem you’re trying to solve, it’s not worth it. That’s it. Are you really willing to exchange 2-7 of the most fruitful years of your life for a problem that kinda-sorta interests you? Consider it deeply.

I would go as far to say that if you don’t have a thesis that you’re attached to and a professor that will provide the right environment for you, you shouldn’t begin grad school. The people who tell you otherwise are people who made the same mistake and want others to fall into the same trap so they can justify their own errored thinking. There’s a reason for the glut of sub-par literature being published right now. Academia is incentivized to push young people through expensive PhD programs.

Take a moment, invest time in understanding yourself honestly. Who are you meant to be? A cupcake decorator? Fuck it, start baking. You probably won’t have to move to Asia unless you have a compulsive adventure complex.

Reflect deeply on your image of the best version of yourself. It will probably have nothing to do with a career, and that’s fine. If your job is providing you with a means to being yourself, more power to you.

Many people think they have to make money or have a secure job before they can pursue what they really want. Forget that. Security is an illusion to keep you complacent at your job. Millions of people who sought security were laid off in the financial crisis 10 years ago.

Hone in on who you are, and go all in on yourself. If your ultimate vision is to be a mountaineer in the French Alps, forget the business career to finance it. Find the most direct route from here to the Alps. It probably costs less than you think. Fear of jumping off the culturally codified bandwagon is often the central hindrance to personal success.

And if you find yourself in your own crisis when this article finds you, let the wiser words of a mentor wash over you: never let a good crisis go to waste.

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Tim Urban of Wait But Why just released a timely post on How to Pick a Career

Follow me on Twitter @krisbuote