Midlife Crisis

Whenever I think about what drives me, what is the point, I often turn towards the Plan of Salvation. This plan states that God wants all mankind to return to live with Him in Celestial Glory and Eternal Life. These are my goals for continuing forward, for doing what I do, but do I really understand them? If I did understand them better how would they change my day to day activities? How could I be more friendly? How could I be more helpful? I'm in such a good condition with life right now, going to school and doing fine, have a stable job, have a wonderful wife, and blessed with comforts of life, food, shelter, clothing, love, air, and lots of entertainment, much of which is free. I have a hockey team that I love and no longer costs me a time since all has been paid. So it makes me wonder, what do I do with the money that I earn?

There are several choices. Save, spend on video games, spend on hockey equipment, let my wife use to her hearts desire, etc. But whenever I accelerate my mind to the end of the purchase and the end of the day, what eternal benefit do the things I spend on really give? What Eternal Worth can I create by using money? I can create opportunities to spend time with my wife. I can do activities with my family that we otherwise wouldn't be able to. I can cook for others. How can I serve others while using the money that I earn to fuel it?

The other things that I really want to do cannot be bought, especially not with money. I want to become more Christlike. I want to be a friend. I want to be able to get to know those around me and love them. I want to continually better and I want to have a drive to do better. But even that means nothing if I can't bring my family with me.

I want to create. I want to build. At the end of the day I want to look at something and be proud of it. In my specific line of work that means I don't really need to buy anything. I have a computer. I can program. I can design and build. I can organize. All it takes is time. So how can I convince myself to constantly input that investment of my temporal stream so that I can derive the benefits and output of labor? What things do I currently look back on and say, oh yeah, I did that? I've created the design for books.byu.edu. I created the design for byubookstore.com. I created the CRM for Cougar Tech at BYU. I created a Customer Sales Representative tracker for work. I've helped with numerous improvements and am currently working on plenty of documentation for those. I've created a socket game using events.

I remember a dream I once had. I wanted to create a fighting game that would allow multiplayer's to test their reaction time and keyboard skills while dueling with stick figures. The stick figures on screen would duel it out with hits and blocks and depending on what user finally won the game would display their stickfigure as delivering that final blow. Always makes me wonder why movies have such unrealistic battle scenes.