chasing meaning

I so very strongly dislike this website’s mobile app. I read a piece on there, maybe six to ten links deep into a rabbit hole, liked it so much I left the app to draft this, and when I reopened the app it reloaded and kicked me to the homepage1. original piece gone forever, irrecoverable.

say la vee. it was about the meaning of life, or rather finding meaning in life, and made an argument for optionality in your chosen vocation. you should be trying lots of things, and going deep on the ones that resonate. meaning is a slippery term, a flighty spectre to chase. you never know for certain which corner she may be hiding around, and even once you catch sight she’ll so often slip through grasping fingers.

and though I’m being facetious here, I really take no issue with the argument and thought it was a fantastic bit of writing. locking yourself into a set path (doctor/firefighter/reply guy) because you thought it noble or heroic at the age of 18 is probably not the best path to living your best life - most of us (i think) have little clarity on these things to begin with, and life can take so many turns. but this to me feels like a non-answer, “just keep looking!” doesn’t help us get any closer to resolving “where do I find meaning?”.

and maybe its because the question is poorly stated or understood, which can’t really be blamed on either the author or the asker. I think ”what should I be doing?” is really downstream of “how should I be?” and the answer to that question is definitively: “as you are” (or perhaps “as you are meant to be”)

now if you’re thinking that this sounds like a poorly written koan, this guy is clueless, you may be on to something. but I think it gives us a far better platform to think from - the right career path is so context dependent that the answer is different for everybody, hence the usual “idk try things and hope you get lucky” response that leaves me so dissatisfied. who you are/your best self/your Soul makes up a large part of that context, and by focusing there we can get an actual foothold on what to do. or rather, once you have a grasp on how you want to show up in the world, the right thing to do in any given context sort of just unfolds.

this isn’t actually a how-to on any of this either, to be clear. I’m just some guy who’s fallen off the Bill Plotkin deep end2. but asking “how/who do I want to be?” has given me more clarity in the last two months3 than “what should I be doing” and reading 80,000 Hours4 etc. did for me in ~ six years of my adult life. I am still clueless and wandering, to be certain. But to steal a quote from a friend5 who I think read it in the Lion Trackers Guide to Life:

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there

conversations I’m having/things I’m reading

I think corporate consulting breeds a certain sort of apathy that’s hard to spot in the action. after a year of building background angst and back and forth should-I-stay-or-should-I-go, a friend suggested asking whether I wanted to live the lives of the more senior people around me. The decision to quit went from a painstaking exercise in pro/con mental calculus to “duh, wtf am I still doing here”. As evidenced by the above, the question of what to do now, however, is still very much open. Been burning through VGR’s the Art of Gig recently for some practical leads.

Really enjoyed Dr. Gena Gorlin’s Getting tight with future you, and her thoughts on our relationship with ambition. Continuing to mix in chapters from the Art and Science of Doing Engineering to this train of thought. Also, Casey Handmer’s You should be working on Hardware, which has inspired me to start breaking things again.

I spent a week in the Sierra’s in late August with a lovely group, and the level of inner stillness I found out there is… hard to describe. Many of us lamented it was difficult to return to this state in our home cities6, but the point was made that maybe peace/stillness/rest isn’t always the optimal goal in every moment, the work of a life is never really done. thinking harmony with the demands of the moment might be a better goal. sometimes life demands six cups of coffee and juggling twelve tasks while running to catch a subway, and attuning your own energy to that in a masterful way contains the much of the same beauty found in a still moment in the woods when you let it all drop away again. Trying to force one sort of energy in a very different place is bound to create dissonance, but this doesn’t make any one inherently bad; harmony is just appropriately dialing your energy to the moment around you. Related reading: Nate Soares Rest in Motion and the rest of the Replacing Guilt series.

Another side effect of that backpacking trip is that Geneen Marie Haugen’s poem The Return has been stuck in my head for months and I still don’t know what to do with it. Looking forward to fall and whatever that brings.

Cheers