In my therapy session today, we discussed sex, then relationships, and finally approaches to life. My main takeaway from the session was the dichotomy between how we can choose to approach goals, processes, or anything at all really. On the one hand, everything can be treated as something to be achieved. A gold medal, a girlfriend, a tax band. Things are metrics, quantifiable. Binary, 0 or 1 - done or not done. On the other hand, 'things' are more a byproduct of gradual processes. You didn't become good at playing the guitar because you learnt to play a song, but rather you learnt to play a song because you got better at the guitar. You didn't become successful in your career because you're making over 100k, but instead you're earning over 100k because you got smarter, learned more, did the right things.

I don't think I'm explaining this very well. In essence, the epitome of the second approach would be to truly detach yourself from the outcome, and to only place value on how much you're improving and learning. And as a result- milestones, goals, whatever you want to call them - will come and go naturally.

In reality, most people lie somewhere inbetween along this spectrum of philosophies. Most don't have the luxury of living day to day without a care where they might end up, whilst conversely, fully basing the value of your life around arbitrary levels of achievement is bound to consume you - though undoubtedly some have made fortunes off it. Personally, I skew way more towards the goal-chasing lunatic, where 'achievement' in my mind is divided into two echelons, success, and unsuccess, and I perpetually exist in the latter. But I think one of the most important things I took away from this comparison was the necessity to ask why I had these goals in place.

What do you want a partner for? Well, to talk to, to hug, to share the small beauties in life with. But yes, those are things you do with a partner, why do you actually want one? Are you trying to fill a void, one that you didn't know existed? Or are the other parts of your life already complete, and you're looking for something more? Then are you not satisfied in your life as it is now?

Why do you think you need to make more than a hundred thousand pounds a year? Well, I'd be able to buy a big house (not really these days), fly off to Italy without checking the price tag, and not live in worry about the next bill to pay. But are you financially struggling now? Do you think this number would suddenly make life better? No, probably not. I've never made a year's salary in my life, and I have no idea what material difference to my life making an arbitrarily larger amount of money would make. But somewhere along the way, I convinced myself I needed *more*.

Suddenly, for me at least, these goals seemed far more arbitrary than they were when my mind first planted their respective seeds. I'd been asking myself what the best discipline of software development was to make as much money as possible - distributed systems? What do I need to learn to be a good distributed systems engineer? Yet now, with the desire to succeed no longer having any well-formed motivation, it felt absurd, almost like I had been lying to myself the whole time.

Now, here comes the obvious answer. Don't treat what you're doing as a means to an end, treat it as the end itself! Learn because you like learning, not because it'll make you more money. Go on dates to talk to new people, to broaden your perspective, to find out what kind of person you could talk to for hours and what kind of person pisses you off within seconds of them opening their fat gob. Do what makes you happy, truly happy, and not someone else's idea of happiness that was fed to you through the algorithm, and don't look back. If you're always chasing milestones, the next milestone will never be enough, nor the next, until one day you wind up dead and unhappy. Yippee!

It's soppy and sentimental, and most certainly unrealistic, and yet I think it's something to strive for. Shocker - thinking about how your choices and behaviours actually improve your life instead of doing things you just think will improve your life will make life better, and living easier. And it's so much easier said than done, but thinking about it gives me so much joy. Just imagining it almost feels like a freedom, the burden of requirements and expectations lifted completely from my shoulders, free to soar and dream to my heart's content.

Back in reality, we have deadlines, degree classifications, job titles, bills. I don't think there exists a future where everyone can follow their dreams without repercussion. In the end, it is just a thought experiment. I think it prompts an important question though, one that's worth me asking for the rest of my life: Why am I doing what I'm doing, and what do I think it'll bring me? And if I can't answer those two questions in a way that I find satisfying, it'll probably be time for a quarter/mid/three-quarter-life crisis. ⛹︎