81–90 of 223 posts
To become one with God, through his commandments, mostly by loving, clothing, and feeding my neighbor. However, my performance is woefully inadequate. Luckily, my God is a loving God, and has me on a PIP, so hopefully we see some good progress with the time I have left.
E.g. Would love to bring joy to people by making a game without thoughts of optimizing monetization. Or form a non-profit in various areas. Or spend years on open source software solving big hairy problems.
But for now I'd rather the kids eat well, be able to travel the country for sports, and enjoy a comfortable life.
I wrote this back when I was 18, in response to the question “what kind of life do you want to live?” but I always come back to it. Something about it still resonates with me. “What kind of life do you want to live?” “A life full of color. I couldnt bear to have a boring life: I want my days to be full of joy and pain and laughter and success and failure and broken hearts and love. To be honest I don’t care where I e…
The first one is gaining just enough money that I can ponder the meaning of life. The second one is pondering the meaning of life.
The hardest part of this type of journey is realizing you don’t need money to be happy or feel contentment. It may not make sense right now, but you may spend the next decade or so chasing money to get to a point of contentment only to realize that you’re chasing after money because you think it’s going to give you peace. The turn is when you figure out money doesn’t give you peace. Contentment, happiness are choices…
it does give me peace, it relaxes me to know my son will have food and shelter. That we'll be able to pay for learning resources and fun things. It helps to know that, if things get a bit rough, we will have some money to hold on until things get better.
It relaxes me to know that if any of us get sick, we'll be able to pay the bills... hopefully.
> Basically, I want to grow old doing what I love, not feeling that I am working. That’s where I’m at, now. I was forced into that, but, after a few years, I’ll admit it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m not rich; and likely never will be, but I’m going to be fine. I was considering working for another ten years, and adding more to a pile, but it would have cost me my soul. This was made quite clear to m…
> cow orker A bovine creature from Orkney? :)
In the meantime, I'm working on FIRE as a means to allow myself to do just that.
Financial freedom has always been my first goal, because it allows me to have the true autonomy I need to fulfill my passions/mission.
This allows me to say "why are we/I doing this?" to nearly everything in my life. But also it forces me to answer the questions I don't want to face too. (why am I treating my body so poorly by X action? What will happen if I can't stop doing this?)
Just this morning dealing with 20+ year unresolved relationship communication issues... I was able to just say "can I have Y?" from my spouse and she said yes. But also I said "I feel like I am guessing what you want with Z, do you know what you want and are you waiting for me to guess?" And she said "I actually don't know what I want with Z."
I was able to say "That's good, because if you did know and we wasted 20 years more of me just guessing, that would be a lot of wasted time you not getting what you want, and it would make me feel pretty bad about this. And you just saying 'I don't know' means we get to figure it out together, which can be great."
Pure freedom, but it still only comes in moments despite my earth shattering experiences from the past, so you still have to work at it to keep it.
I find it very curious that the phrase "None of this matters!" can be simultaneously depressing and liberating, depending on who is reading. Understanding can't just be transmitted through words, and requires introspection. Congratulations on your epiphany! I optimize life for happiness. I try shape my life to enjoy the process like you said: good work-life balance, doing something that challenges me just enough on a…
I once told my brother, who was suffering from anxiety, that "No one cares about you when you're out in public". I meant it in the liberating way I had come to know it, which is that no one is paying you the negative attention you think they are, because we're all pretty similar so we all blend in with the crowds. But my parents saw it as an insult. Different perspectives I suppose.
So not so much a difference of perspective, but of vocabulary.