On July 23rd I will be retiring from engineering.

The term is a bit dramatic, to be sure, but I love using it because it does convey the sense of finality that I want associated with my leaving - I am well and truly determined never to do any “engineering” again, even on a contract basis.

Depending on how you want to define it, I began my engineering “career” at 16 when I graduated from high school and went to engineering school (out in Prescott, Arizona, to study aerospace engineering). Or, job-wise, I graduated in 2000 with a Master’s degree in engineering and began working at 24.

Either way, at 32 I find myself leaving the only professional career I have known and trained for, and a career in which I have been very successful. Instead, I begin a new career in a completely different field - “Communication” - focusing on critical cultural studies, rhetoric, folklore, and the artful performance of everyday life.

And so, as I tell people that I am “retiring,” and especially as I tell them what I intend to study, every now and then I hear someone joke that I am leaving engineering to go hide “from the real world” in academia.

Admittedly I probably provoke those statements with my own dramatism about “retiring” at merely 32. Or, those may also stem from the popular perception or stereotype of “academics” in their ivory towers, especially given the passivity and elitism of terms like “cultural studies” or “folklore.” However, the question remains: why AM I retiring?

I am retiring from engineering TO enter the real world - and not just to enter it as an observer from an academic tower somewhere but to engage and grapple with the messiness and the art of everyday life. I have found that engineering does not equip me in any credible or meaningful way to engage with the messy world of people. Bluntly, the world of engineering is a better place to hide from the real world than the world of serious activist social research.

To those who think I am about to go hide in an ivory tower somewhere, I challenge them to come with me into the world of people, a world where emotions and heated identity politics simmer just below the surface of every social gathering, where even the simplest of conversations requires an artistic sense and subjectivity that no scientific formula could ever capture.

I leave engineering with deep technical skills in objectivity and quantitative analysis, skills that were originally designed to solve challenging technical and scientific problems. I also leave engineering with a profound and determined criticism of the failure of such approaches in dealing with the real challenges that people face everywhere in their everyday lives.

There has always been a romantic and creative aspect of engineering - more so than science, engineering has always had a focus on innovative solutions to problems. Metaphorically, engineering used to be seen as “applied science.” That is no longer the case - that changed ever since the term “time-to-market” became an engineering design factor.

No - engineering is the bastard step-child of science’s sordid affairs with business. While science at least has the noble ambition of a quest for objective knowledge, the quest for dollars has instead lured science into bed with business principles of all stripes, some respectable but most quite sleazy, and the result of those conflicted writhings is an engineering that does not even pretend to have an ideal higher than the drive to make more money efficiently.

What began as a drive toward time-saving inventions, from cars to computers, has starkly been exposed for what it is: a drive to push people into stressful and violently unhealthy lifestyles. From cars to computers, people actually have LESS time and are MORE stressed today than only a few years ago. Technological advances have only served to make people BUSIER, trapped in endless demands for more PRODUCTIVITY - defined, starkly, as MORE OUTPUT in LESS TIME. Where are the shimmering relaxations we were promised we would enjoy in all that time we were told we would save with the advent of technology? Engineers hide from this by shrugging and saying “hey, technology is neutral, it is up to people to use it well.” That sentiment speaks volumes about just how irresponsible and disconnected from the real world engineering has become.

We now have cellphones that take video clips and promise a more connected world “at Sprint Speed,” while such devices only disconnect people from each other by immersing them in a constant bombardment of technologically enhanced information overload. We might as well imbibe hallucinatory recreational drugs - we would get the same glazed eyes and self-absorbed mindlessness without half the energy we use to run our iPods and cellphones.

Even medical technology does not stand unscathed: where are the promised cures for cancer? How about for diabetes? Or for Alzheimers? Or more effective distribution and delivery of even basic cures for preventable diseases? Or solutions for the worldwide challenges of basic food supply and rudimentary sanitation?

Or even a more critical look at the ill effects of our industrialized and commercialized lifestyle? How about a better focus on so-called “alternative” medicine and natural remedies? Or even such radical suggestions as “more outdoor play and sunlight for kids”? There is something strange about a system that makes even something as natural as home childbirth into something as stressful and mechanized and commercialized as hospital birthing wings.

Instead we have an ever increasing supply of pills for stronger erections, younger-looking faces, and artificial hair. What a damning statement about how modern medicine hides from reality! We invest so much effort into such trivial indulgences of our narcissism, going so far as to sing “Viva Viagra” while major swathes of the world die daily from preventable diseases and inexcusable starvation?!

Surely, however, engineers are not to blame - are they not merely productive workers? Is technology not merely neutral? Is there not a bigger problem with culture, corruption, crime, and dirty politics? Is there not a bigger problem with the fact that there is more money in cosmetic surgery than in non-profit medical care? That there is more money in reality TV advertising than in education?

Then who are the real culprits? Who decides how technology is best used - and even which technology is to be developed?

I propose that THOSE are the real world questions that engineers are too afraid to ask. I propose that the world of engineering is a safe place to hide from questions of such subjectivity. Engineering has nothing to say (except expressions of shock and terror) about the real world of social life and culture, a world where numbers are not as safe as they seem and solid facts become fluid social constructs.

Politics, business interests, and socio-economic factors all play major roles in creating the sordid world we live in - a world where Brangelina’s unborn babies take up more media coverage than Zimbabwe’s Mugabe brutally holding on to power at the expense of cheap African lives.

And engineering has nothing to say about such worlds, except to serve as a mute slave to those in power by making better weapons that are more efficient at making human beings more impersonal and remote from the act of killing other human beings.

And there lies exposed the myth of the “real world” that people accuse me of hiding from.

I hereby challenge people to think AND ACT more critically about how they themselves hide from the everyday reality of their worlds, whether they hide through entertainment, hide through technological distractions, or hide in mindless careers pursuing dreams that do not extend beyond their own orgasms.

So I am leaving engineering because what the “real world” needs now is not one more cell phone, but people who can boldly live critical lives actively challenging the dominant themes of their culture, people who take a look around and ask tough questions about things that everyone else assumes are unquestionably true, people who pursue sacrificial lifestyles that value other people’s needs over time and money, and people who can stand up to dirty politics and corrupt ideologies.

Care to join me? It will be a reckless life!