Frustrated, disillusioned, down

Yet another month, yet another enterprise-architecture conference that I need to go to and can’t possibly afford; and yet another month gone by without the slightest hint of any paid work. (Fully half the speakers at that conference are people I know personally, or at least are direct colleagues I work with online; I even helped one of the speakers to write his conference proposal a few months back. The difference between us is that they are all paid to be there, and are in very high-paid work; whereas I’m neither, even though I’m frequently acknowledged as one of the thought-leaders for the entire profession. So once again I’m in effect being asked to pay to sort out others’ thinking, so that they can go on to sell that thinking at their very high consultancy rates: the usual joys of living too far out on the ‘bleeding edge’, but I have no idea what else to do… and at least these days I do get some respect, though respect alone don’t pay no bills… 🙁 )

What is the point in doing any of this? After a brief upward blip last month, book sales have again slumped down, to half what they were last month, which means that after almost two years flat-out work I’m yet again still giving away far more than I sell, for no visible result; even the free downloads from the website have plummeted to the point where there’s been no download at all for the last three days. And the sense of success after the TOGAF conference last month has faded away to nothing: the only real change I can see in ‘the trade’ is that the TOGAF types think they’re doing something new by trying to shoehorn the whole of the business world into the minute subset represented by the scope of TOGAF9, rather than TOGAF 8, and only occasionally wondering why it still doesn’t work. The quality of analysis is so pathetic that I even came across one guy who placed ‘Goal’ and ‘Location’ in the same column of his metamodel – in other words, insists that a business decision and a physical building are identical, because they’re both ‘imaginary’ from an IT-centric perspective…

I haven’t seen incompetence on this scale since the bad old days of the domestic-violence ‘industry’… yet it’s all too obvious now that it’s entrenched and endemic throughout the whole ‘enterprise’-architecture field. So who the heck do I think I’m kidding when I say I believe I can do something useful here? Or anywhere? Seems no-one’s even interested in finding ways to sort out the mess: they’re either playing counting-angels-on-a-pinhead games, or too busy chasing imaginary money or whatever. In the meantime, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket: but no-one’s doing anything about it. They’re waiting around for someone else to fix it – some idiot like me, who then gets stomped on in the rush to claim the credit.

All of which is getting me down: seriously down. Again. It’s been a very long time since I had anything to actually live for (though fortunately also quite a long time since I had anything to ‘not-live’ for…); I’ve managed to keep going only by inventing the hope that what I do makes some tiny useful difference in the world, but it’s increasingly difficult to keep up the optimism in the face of so many weeks and months and years of unrelenting reassertions of utter failure.

Looks like I’ve once again been trying to change an entire industry – probably the entire world – and trying to do it all on my own because I don’t have a clue how do otherwise. Not surprising I burn out, really. I talk about the need for collaboration, but I’m not good at it myself: having been trashed so often, and been the Outsider so long and in so many different senses, I literally don’t know how. Right now I’ve been struggling to get my head around metamodels and toolset design and, inevitably, the vast complexity of what would in effect be a major software development to implement, simply because none of the existing toolsets even come close to what we need for enterprise architecture, and we won’t be able to get EA working unless there is a toolset that supports it. Which, yes, is an obvious candidate for collaboration. But it’s become painfully clear that I can’t explain myself well enough for others to understand it; I can see it clearly enough, but it’s all too big, too complex to put into words. It’s obvious I can’t do it without support – in fact obvious I can’t keep going in any sense without support – but seems I know no way to garner that support other than through a kind of angry expostulation, which soon drives away what little support I do have (if I don’t run away first, which also happens all too often). Hence failure, again… and again… and again…

So is it time to just give up, and forget the whole thing? Add enterprise-architecture to that towering, teetering pile of utter failures that define my so-called life? Limp back off ‘home’ to Australia or whatever and try to pretend that… well, what? Find something else to fail at? One of my Twitter correspondents repeated that all-too-accurate, all-too-painful quote on his ‘Thoreau Page’ the other day: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them”. Much of my time and work is about helping others find their own song, and I know I’m quite good at doing so; but whilst it may be that there’s space in my life for the songs of everyone else, it seems that there’s no room in it for mine. What is my own song? – I have no idea. After almost sixty years, I still have no idea – unless it is solely a song of failure, time after time, hour after hour, day after day, a song that hurts almost too much to bear, yet seems to be the only one I know. I’ve shown so many, many others how to sing their duets, harmonies, orchestral choirs; yet no space, it seems, for any of those in my own life – just a cracked, broken, mumbled solo in an empty, broken desert of my own creation. A ‘life of quiet desperation’ that can include space for everyone but me: “My life without me”, to quote another old film-title…

So yeah, frustrated, disillusioned, down. More than just a bit. Oh well.