Looking back, looking forward

I turned 29 today, but I didn’t plan to start this blog on my birthday. It just happened naturally.

I’ve been reflecting on my career for the past six months, but those thoughts have become much louder over the past few weeks. I started working in 2018 after graduating, so I’ve now spent eight years in the software industry.

When I look back on those eight years, I find myself asking two simple questions: What do I see? And more importantly, how do I feel?

The answer isn’t what I expected.

On paper, everything seems to be fine.

I come from a small town in Sialkot, Pakistan, where I was raised by a single mother after my father’s death. I graduated in 2018 and started working for a US company in Pakistan. I spent three years there, learned a lot, and made good money. One of the things I’m most proud of from that time is being able to retire my mother.

Later, I found a job in the Netherlands and moved here. Over the past five years, I’ve worked at three companies alongside some really smart people and built a pretty decent life for myself here while also being able to support my family back home.

By most standards, I’d say I’m doing just fine. If you asked my friends or the people I grew up with, they’d probably say the same.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I don’t feel satisfied. At first, I thought maybe I’d simply set unrealistic expectations for myself. But I don’t think that is true.

At 21, I didn’t have huge ambitions. I just wanted a job that paid decent money so I could support my family and have a normal life. I never imagined that I would find a job in Europe, move abroad, and build a life here. If my 21 year old self met me today, I think he would be proud.

So why am I still unhappy?

One reason, I think, is that my definition of success has changed over the last eight years. At 21, success meant stability. It meant having a good job, being financially secure, and being able to support my family. But now that I have those things, I realise that they are no longer enough on their own.

When I look back at my career, I sometimes feel like I didn’t do enough. There is a voice inside me that says I should have achieved more. But achieving more, for me, is not just about earning more money. It is also about having a sense of accomplishment, feeling that I did meaningful work, contributed to something impactful, or at least tried things that genuinely excited or inspired me.

Maybe I haven’t given myself enough opportunities to explore or take risks. Maybe I have followed the safer and more predictable path instead of exposing myself to different problems, different areas of technology, and different ways of solving them.

I would have reached this realisation eventually, but the speed at which the software industry has changed over the last 12 to 18 months has definitely accelerated it.

One moment that really stayed with me was reading about the story behind Cursor. After learning that one of Cursor’s founders is Pakistani, I found myself reading more about how the company came to be. What struck me was that it began while the founders were still at MIT and has since grown into one of the most influential AI tools for developers.

That wasn’t the moment I thought, “Why didn’t I build Cursor?” I’m not comparing myself to MIT graduates or saying I should have built a company like that. What stayed with me was a different question: why haven’t I developed the habit of thinking about software that way? Why haven’t I spent more time looking for interesting problems, exploring ideas, and trying to build things that solve them?

Since then, I’ve found myself paying much closer attention to people building products, contributing to open source, creating frameworks and tools, and solving problems that impact millions of users. I look at companies like Cursor, and researchers and engineers at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and I see people pushing technology forward in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. More than anything, it has made me reflect on the kind of contribution I want to make over the next phase of my career.

That naturally leads to the question that sits at the heart of where I am today: what do I want to do next?

How do I make sure the next eight years of my career are different? How do I make sure that when I look back in 2035, I feel happier about the work I have done and the person I have become?

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer yet.

Looking back is the easy part. It is easy to identify what feels missing or what I wish I had done differently. The difficult part is looking into the future and deciding what is actually worth dedicating the next five to eight years of my career to.

That is the question I am trying to answer.

Even though I don’t have an answer yet, what I do have are the lessons I’ve learned over the past eight years. I think they can help shape how I approach the next phase of my career.

There are a few things I already know. One of them is that I don’t want to keep playing it safe. I want to be braver. I want to take more risks, step into unfamiliar territory, explore new ideas, and figure out what truly excites me.

I want to discover the kinds of problems I enjoy thinking about, the work that inspires me to push myself, and the things that make me genuinely excited to sit down and build.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m ready for this journey or if I’ll even be able to stay on this path. Maybe life will get the better of me, and I’ll slowly drift back into old habits, only to find myself asking these same questions again a few years from now.

But what I do know is that I’m at a stage in my career where I can no longer ignore them. Whether I have the answers or not, I know I have to start looking for them.