Ask HN: I implemented the life I designed: perfect but I feel lost. What now?

I've been exploring pretty much the same questions for the last few years. The first couple years felt distressing because I didn't feel like I was making progress quickly enough and I had way more questions than answers. Lately, I feel more positive about the direction of travel, and I've made peace with this being a slow, difficult journey. Seems like it should be "easy", but it's really not. Accepting that and not feeling too hard on myself helped a lot.

I haven't figured out a Grand Unified Theory or anything, but a few ideas that seem important to me:

1. Altruism & Relationships - covered extensively here already. Cultivating a few deep relationships and picking altruistic goals seem to be the scalable approaches to escaping the Hedonistic Treadmill and they're probably necessary components of any post-financial independence life strategy.

2. Growth - I'm not sure if this is a universal human thing or just something entrepreneur types are predisposed to, but I've realised that I'm much happier when I'm learning and growing. When the learning curve flattens out, I get feel unsettled. This seems to line up with your observation that you intensely take up a hobby, then shift to something new. Startups scratch this itch well because the company's growth forces constant personal growth. Initially, I tried to transcend this need to always be in motion thinking it was unsustainable over the long term - but lately I've been more accepting of it.

3. Change the Game - the trouble with growth as you approach the peak of whatever career/goal/journey you're on is it becomes exponentially harder to level up and satisfy that need for motion. I think the solution is to pivot to a totally different journey where you can start as a beginner and have a lot of attainable learning & growth ahead of you. I suspect this is a big part of why successful people tend to pursue philanthropy at the height of their careers - it's a whole new game, with new challenges to overcome.

From those ideas, I decided to pick a difficult, new domain to focus on with a goal of figuring out how to do some meaningful good. I happened to choose climate change, but health, education, poverty reduction, democracy, or any number of other issues fit the bill of "hard enough to provide years of learning/growth + focus is helping others". By picking something and committing, I avoided getting stuck in and endless loop of trying to decide what the optimal area is - a bias to action helps a lot when you get stuck with too much choice.

For me, the concrete starting point was Googling "best climate change books", reading half a dozen of them, and trusting my curiosity to guide me from there. I've spent the last year learning, and now I'm converging on starting a startup - although there are plenty of other structures that could work too (non-profits, volunteering, working on open source, consulting, advising, etc). The journey hasn't given me total clarity or magically solved everything - but by imposing some structure ("work full-time to figure out how you can help with climate change") on my life, things are at least less confusing.

Happy to discuss more privately if you'd like.

Matthew 6:33

A good question, and I'm sure many people ask this every day. I'll try to do my best to answer.

It takes different forms, different paths for everyone. Not everyone goes down the same path. I think the best question/mindset you should start to think is this is a life with many people. You are only one piece of that puzzle, try working on your empathy first. You don't seem judgemental, but consider how others are feeling when you talk with them, listen to them more closely. Put your thoughts and replies before them, make _them_ the more important person in the conversation. (Again, not saying you are judgemental, but just in general).

Eventually, this desire to help others before yourself grows; it becomes your default response. With this, I've felt myself grow more humbler, more understanding of others and less judgemental. What you may experience is just this greater joy - helping others is giving you this happiness that nothing else gives.

At this stage, you typically start to realize bad habits you may have, distractions. We as people distract ourselves with a myriad of things in order to avoid feelings or situations. Try to uncover that, dig deep down and look at and help heal your hurts. This will likely take time and a change of behavior if you have them, but it's well worth it. Once you feel you have a good handling of this, you might start to notice others who have their own hurts. As you speak to them and gain trust with them, bring it up from time to time (if you are close), you may have an opportunity to heal them (which in of itself really makes you feel like you are doing good with your life).

If you read this, please do not be dismissive of what I am about to say, but without my belief in God - I really wouldn't know what I'm doing here. Honestly, even _in_ my belief I still very much question my purpose here on Earth. With everything else I have said up above, there was still this piece of my heart that felt like it was missing, and no matter what, nothing could fill in that gap. Point being, even though I still feel lost often, knowing and believing in God, makes me feel better that the path I'm on is on a purpose for God and for others I meet, touch, and heal along the way.

I hope this message helps you along. If you have any questions, feel free to respond.

I suggest finding a therapist and talking it through with them. I feel like I'm in much the same situation - I'm lucky, have more than enough of the things I need, job that makes enough money, health more or less, etc. but feel lost on purpose.

I think talking with a therapist is so great I recommend it to everyone, not just those who are suffering from some kind of "problem." Only you can really find the solution, but that doesn't mean you have to do it alone. Many times I find what to do to be somewhat counter-intuitive.

Sometimes external review is required to make sure the requirements are met for such complex problems as implementing a life. ;)