A story about an office worker who enjoys baking cakes.

I have an office worker whose hobby is baking cakes. It is interesting to hear about when he makes cakes. His company makes big games. That is, countless numbers of people division of labor are working to create a complex piece of software by a deadline. When you do this kind of work, you don’t really understand your contribution to the outcome. I start to wonder, “Couldn’t I be there without it? The question arises. Even if one employee is hospitalized for a car accident, the game is managed with a high degree of redundancy in order to release the game on schedule. In other words, “Wouldn’t it be fine if I wasn’t there?” The objective answer to this question is “Yes.

On the other hand, in baking a cake, all responsibility for the outcome lies with you. If it turns out well, it is my ability, and if it fails, it is my fault. This type of manufacturing seems to be a source of self-assurance for him.

This story touches deeply on a problem that many people in today's society face: the search for individual value and self-actualization within a large organization or project. As a company employee, his day-to-day life is so caught up in his role as a member of a large game development project that he finds it difficult to see his own contribution and the value of his existence within that project. This is probably due to the fact that while the team's accomplishments are certainly significant, the individual contributions are less tangible.

However, through his hobby of baking cakes, he has a very different set of values and accomplishments. In cake making, his decisions are reflected in everything from the ingredients used to the final design and taste, and the results are directly attributed to him. He can accept all successes and failures as his own. Such direct feedback and results bring him a great sense of fulfillment and self-affirmation.

The time he devotes to baking cakes is a place for him to reaffirm his own abilities and create his own unique achievements. This contrast offers an important insight into the process of discovering one’s self-worth and pursuing self-actualization that modern working people face. It means that work is not the only place for self-actualization, and that hobbies and creative activities can be an important source of personal fulfillment and self-affirmation.

I was also using some software and an inexplicable error prevented me from moving on, damaging my self-esteem. So I washed the dishes. Your experience is very similar to the above story. Many of us experience situations where our work stalls due to inexplicable errors we face while using software, which in turn affects our self-esteem. These technical problems are often beyond our control and their resolution can take time. It is natural to question one's own abilities in such situations.

However, your choice to wash dishes is an interesting coping strategy. This action provided an opportunity to leave temporary frustration by shifting the focus to another task with a direct outcome. The act of washing dishes is a relatively simple task, yet one that is easy to feel a sense of accomplishment because the clear outcome of clean dishes is tangible at the end of the task. It can be an effective way to restore a sense of self-esteem through direct feedback.

Unlike the challenges faced at work or in other complex projects, these mundane tasks have a clear process to completion and immediate results. This helps to increase your sense of self-efficacy and restore balance to your mind, even if only temporarily. Your choice demonstrates an effective way to renew one’s mood and rebuild a positive self-perception by tackling a different kind of task when feeling stressed or frustrated.

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