I like knowing how things work. But there are some nuances in there. I realized as an undergrad that I didn't really care all that much how various machines and mechanisms worked, and circuit diagrams just bugged me. I wasn't particularly tech-minded like other physics majors. The thing I enjoyed most about doing physics was getting glimpses of how the universe worked, little peeks at a very broad existential reality that transcended everything else. My favorite day in any physics class remains the day that one of my professors took Maxwell's equations and made light. I knew it would happen, certainly I knew that the fundamental equations governing electromagnetism could, when solved, produce electromagnetic radiation. But I was still absolutely floored by the majesty of it all. The handful of people on earth who knew my obsessions in physics know they often centered on Mach's principle and variational principles (often known as least action principles)--simple, fundamental ideas that govern (or, in the case of Mach's principle, might govern) the basic processes underlying the universe.
But I came to find that my future doesn't lie in physics. I still love the ideas but I became far too much of a relativist to retain the simple idea that attracted me to physics in the first place: that it was the closest thing to a window on Truth that mankind would ever have. There's a scene in Inception--which you should see (TJ)--where Leonardo DiCaprio's character draws a diagram of two sides of a circle eating each other, explaining that while we sleep our mind perceives a certain reality at the same time it's creating that reality. The truth is, the same could be said about the waking world. We never touch Reality (Reality being, in my young mind, the Holy Grail of physical inquiry), we touch the manifestation--informed, one assumes, by interaction with Reality--created by our minds. We see relations, which seem to be true enough, but we don't see what's being related. We've created an intricate web of concepts to connect things and make (accurate) quantitative predictions, but what the concepts map to in the world outside our minds (assuming, as most of us do, such a thing exists) will forever be a mystery to us. Thus physics could offer me only statements that seemed true, in that the linkages between concepts made predictions that seemed to be borne out by experimentation, but it couldn't give me Truth.
So I wandered over to my other great interest: the workings of human society. Here there was never any promise of Truth; knowing how society works or people tend to interact has no grand metaphysical implications, no existential ramifications. It's just how things work here, in this place in the universe and perhaps this time in global history, among these people. And since I like to know how things work, for me that's enough. Unlike technical devices, I desperately want to know the nuts and bolts of how social institutions work. How does government make things go? How do movements of people shape government? How do programs actually work in practice, what does implementation of ideas look like?
A year ago + a few months I knew very little about health care. I knew the basics of Medicare and Medicaid (extending only slightly beyond simply what they are). About a year ago, finding myself with some free time and interested in a national debate that was heating up, I began learning everything I could about health policy, particularly so I could make sense of the reform bills I was reading. Then I got a job in health policy and became exposed to a much more in-depth view of how things work (indeed, my boss used to run a state's Medicaid managed care program). I love where I am.
My fear around the time I graduated from college was irrelevancy. Ending up at a place that played no role in the way things work, that had things to say that important ears never heard. That isn't the case with the place I am now. They provide guidance to the people who make things work, which is about as relevant as it gets. I remember the difficulty I had even getting people from relatively insignificant non-profits in Chicago on the phone while trying to write my senior thesis (a difficulty that led to me scrapping my first topic) and now it's not particularly strange to get a state's Medicaid director on the phone--and that makes me think I'm right where I want to be right now.
God I love margaritas. What makes you tick? Where do you want to be? Or where do you want to go?
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