Comment by taway2039458768
3 days ago
Thank you for sharing this. I am truly glad to hear that this works for you. This resonates a lot with me, and I hope to acquire the same wisdom.
Similarly, as a goal-oriented person I used a variation of the "Waffle House" method, until I turned 40 not long ago. I still have tons of pages in my personal Wiki with life goals, 5-year goals, goals by year, objectives, GTD lists, etc. It served me well, and I am convinced that it is a valid method, up to a point. In big part thanks to this method I also ticked some "societal and cultural expectation boxes". I would cautiously recommend it to younger people too, provided that it matches their personality.
Then, this goal-orientedness fell apart from about age 38 to 40. Having achieved a number of the goals (reasonable ones, nothing to an excess), suddenly all other "goals" turned into a set of stressors. Some - because I doubt I can ever achieve those, others - because I question whether those are what I really want. I accepted the former, but the latter is harder to figure out. This resulted in a 2-year-long haze. The instinctive approach appeals a lot - I would like to think that I have built enough core values to navigate through life intuitively and respecting who I really am. But it also scares, because it sounds like giving up some some control.
Would love to hear the thoughts of those who went through this already. And with all my love, I sincerely wish everyone who reads this to figure out the life!
> Having achieved a number of the goals (reasonable ones, nothing to an excess), suddenly all other "goals" turned into a set of stressors. Some - because I doubt I can ever achieve those, others - because I question whether those are what I really want.
I'm 25 and I relate to this in a funny way. I see todo list apps like this. People say they get a high when ticking off a task but for me once you keep ticking off things, daily, things start to feel not worth it. Life starts to feel like checkboxes.
Going through the same thing. The body knows what it wants, but you can't always be an unthinking autonomaton grabbing stuff willy-nilly off the store shelf. So just feel it out when you need to just sit on the curb and do whatever, or put yourself in a sandbox and say: "I'm going to go... ___to the boardwalk___, then whatever happens, happens."
I went through a very similar thing at around the same age, and one of the insights that really helped me was meditating on impermanence, and cultivating more mental proprioception (awareness of one's subtle thoughts, "mindfulness", whatever you want to call it.
Put simply, it's fine to have goals. But chasing achievement can be unfulfilling. Why? Because all experiences are fleeting. Even if you train for 5 years and win the gold medal, you get to stand on the podium for a few minutes and then life goes on.
It's easy to get people to agree with this intellectually, but you have to really see it on a deep level. There is nothing really to achieve in life. We make goals and cast them out ahead of ourselves in the future, but if that future comes, it doesn't last. We put ourselves on a treadmill of achievement and becoming, then wonder why we feel stressed.
Instead of imagining some future state of completion, work on being aware of how your mind is moving, all the time. Don't chase goals as a way of disproving some fundamental negative assumption about yourself. Don't make happiness contingent on external conditions.