Geekdinner last night. Nice evening. No girls (except me – where are you ?), no press attention, discussions involving Linux, binary versus decimal GB, network cables …

Now between desert and coffee, Kris drops the following sentence:

we’re all creative, so if computers hadn’t existed, we would be in marketing.

A silence fell after that one, while we mulled this over. The first part of the sentence is flattering. The rest is, to say the least, thought-provoking.
Update: this is actually a quote from a Douglas Coupland book, according to Kris.

I think it all depends of which deep motivations caused one to fall into geekdom:

• to change the world and reach a lot of people: i suppose politics or marketing would be good backup plans here
• because the computer does what i say: power without the moral conundrum of leading people. I guess second place would go to power with the moral conundrum of leading people, like politics or a career
• because i like to know how stuff works (my own motivation): still engineering, with or without computers
• because computers can be more congenial than people (common geek response to teenage angst): this could be said from material things in general, so other crafts would do.
• to make/create things: computer programs are arguably the easiest thing to make if you’ve got a good brain and two left hands. Without computers you can still make things, only it’s harder.

Of course i don’t have a degree in psychology (if you’ve got other motivations, don’t hesitate to share), but you get the point. Although life made us similar, we come from different places. Marketing would be the parallel scenario for only part of us.