I love solving problems. I really do. Fixing something that's broken can be monotonous and boring, but it can also be challenging and rewarding. Solving a problem with a piece of community-built, open source software is a special thrill. No, seriously, it is. I love seeing happy faces when I present business managers, their users, and customers with a free solution to an often very expensive problem. I know that it's extremely nerdy of me to be thrilled to do this sort of thing, but it gives me a feeling of accomplishment. It makes me glad to do what I do.

You should explore Erik Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development, introduced in his book Childhood and Society (W W Norton & Co, 1st ed. 1950; 2nd ed. 1993), to understand this feeling. For working-aged people, say from 21 to 65 or 70, it explains a lot of what you'll experience in your life. In a nutshell, here are the three stages that affect most of us:

• 21-39 years: Intimacy vs. Isolation
• 40-65 years: Generativity vs. Stagnation
• 65 years and older: Ego Integrity vs. Despair

I'm in the 40-65 age range, where there is a need to connect and to contribute through parenting, mentoring, and community involvement. Success during this time leads to feelings of a sense of purpose and fulfillment. However, if you don't find success during these years, you might feel that you have no purpose or that you're unproductive. You might also think of it in system administration terminology of job satisfaction vs. burnout.

I've written about this topic before, but I think you need to evaluate or re-evaluate your life's purpose, your job, and your legacy; you don't have to be rich, famous, or a celebrity to have a legacy.

Being proud of what you've done is a good thing. I haven't always felt so good about my career or existence, so don't think that I'm coming at you from some lofty place. I've slipped into stagnation, burnout, and despair. For many years, I believed that I was simply in survival mode rather than thriving, believing in myself, or having a sense of worth. I think working with computers does that to us. I think that lack of human contact can isolate us. I think that doing crazy things with electronic blips on a screen gives us a sense of purposelessness in some cases. I'm not sure if purposelessness is a real word, but it conveys the meaning appropriately. I think you understand.

Don't confuse generativity with "being happy." No one is happy, excited, joyful, sad, angry, disappointed, or unsatisfied all the time. Life is incremental. We experience life in moments. We build on experiences, but we live life in bits and bytes, and in keeping with the computer theme: garbage in, garbage out. In other words, if you want to enjoy your life and your life's work, you must put your energy into doing your best.

You must decide that your job is your job. It is not you. You are not it. Doing your job well will make you feel good about yourself. Success is measured in how well you do it, not necessarily in how much money you make. Although money can certainly make you somewhat less stressed about some things, it doesn't bring happiness or contentment.

Remember that your job is ultimately focused on helping other people do something that they need or want to do. Whether you help programmers create new software, keep servers alive so that customers can buy groceries, or support gaming systems, you have a purpose: to help others. That is the part that makes me happy. Some people create art. Some operate on hearts. Some cook food. Some of us fix computers, install software, and keep businesses running. Our contributions are no less important than any others.

I only had to look at Erikson's final stage to know where I want to be in the Ego Integrity vs. Despair age. I want to look back on my legacy of writing words, rebooting computers, creating user accounts, and performing backups as a contribution to a world that needed what I had to offer. This is my legacy.

I fix things, I help people, I solve problems, I am a system administrator, and I am happy.

Ken Hess * Senior ADMIN Editor