Engineering Happiness

What makes me happy?

I’ve been trying to figure this out my adult life. When I was a kid, I thought it would be building robots. Giant Robots. I actually got a chance to lead an effort to design a 40 ft tall humanoid last year.

It didn’t work out, the backer suddenly died, but he lived a good life, and in a weird turn of events I helped bury him at his own party in the fall. But that’s another story for another time.

I’m not sure if giant robots was wrong (I was happy for a little bit), but there were some details I wasn’t aware of that dulled the sheen I’d always imagined. Any sufficiently complex project requires a team, and any team is made of people. People all come from different backgrounds, experiences, and levels of skill, and finding or building a team that is complementary, driven, and skillful is probably the hardest thing I’ve done.

I’ve worked on two of these teams, and in those years I found happiness. But we were building rockets to send to space, or vacuum trains to flip transportation on its head. My bar is really high for being satisfied with the work and the team. Nylon 6 ain’t no Ferium S53, and EE’s from Northrup aren’t Astronauts from NASA.

So happy times were short lived. For one reason or another, I couldn’t keep up with the team, or the team couldn’t persist through political struggles. I learned a ton, and walked away with a huge wealth of knowledge about what I want, what I don’t, what I’m good at, and why I’m happy in a given situation, and who I like working with. I learned how to run myself efficiently and build an all star team, crush technical and political problems, and when to move on. Sometimes you roll the dice and they don’t always go your way.

A really solid NPR story relating why creative workers are happy is a great grounding to explain why work is compelling when it is.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122221202

So after my last job – Arrivo – I decided to take inventory and figure out if another startup was going to make me happy. It had kind of been a crap shoot on the ones that turned out amazing (Spacex found me in a google search, Hyperloop picked me up via friend of a friend reference) , so I thought maybe, in the interim, I could build a company and make myself happy. I took the summer to build this website, visit with friends, pencil out a couple business plans and draw up some robots and machine shops, teach some classes at crashspace, walk and lose a ton of weight, have a few parties, go to Defcon and Burning man, try to find myself among personal pursuits.

This was actually pretty awesome. I made new friends, learned all sorts of new things, built a rad home shop, found my next roommates, traveled a bit. It was nice for the first time in ten years to not have a job to worry about. But it kind of got… lonely. It turns out, everyone’s employed (at least in my socioeconomic circles), and so, most of the time I’d end up by myself. I kept myself entertained for about 6 months before it started to get grating.

I like having the team, the difficult technical challenge, and the new stuff to learn on the regular. Like, that permanent magnet stiffness is nonlinear to the 8th power. But I also found out, I don’t need a company to feel like I have worth, to accomplish things, to justify my existence, to motivate me, or to pay me ( though contract work does suck when the client dies).

So. Work and Play are both good ways to temper depression, but what’s missing? I’d venture it’s companionship.

Maybe this whole story is just to say, I got a puppy.

His name is Servo, he’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi ( a tri color variant ), and he’s the cutest little machine I’ve ever had the joy of loving. And he loves me too, which is pretty great.

He’s named after my father, Tom (he asked for that). His full name being Tom Servo Cothern (also a funny MST3K joke), but he responds to Servo. He can already make his way up and down stairs, comes to his name, kinda fetches a ball, and will almost sit. He’s got some of his shots, though had a few illnesses that carried over from the breeder.

He’s already well traveled, attending the Fuzzyland festivities with me and Matt at the beginning of May. I’ll be taking him in to socialize with other dogs and people at Otherlab (where I work) soon.

Servo’s home is a medium sized crate, where he takes his meals and sleeps on the in between times. My roommates Matt and Adelle watch him when I’m away at work (at least until the vaccines kick in). He’ll be enrolled in the puppy school of witchcraft and wizardry when he turns 16 weeks old (in a couple weeks).

I don’t think I’ll be wondering how to be happy at work or on my own anymore. Or at least, when I do, I can just get a big lick from Servo to remember it’s going to be alright. Now I can focus on taking over the world just for funs, not to try to make myself happy, together, with Servo at my side.

• Kyle