Comment by jebarker

Your comment actually suggests that your instincts tell you those things are not as valuable, but you might just be following habit and dopamine loops at the current moment.

Which I guess is to say that GP's "follow your instincts" can also be as difficult as "set goals and hit them", just in different ways.

I feel you. I cannot offer much more than that, but if you care for a friendly advice from someone who is still in the same situation and very much still working on it, setting goals became another way to procrastinate for me.

It is cliche, but system over goals has helped me.. or I guess you could see it as microgoals one does not need to think about much.

Write code for at least X hours per day, read a book for X amount of time, exercise X days a week.

It gives me a checkbox to tick and no overhead in thinking about what goals are achievable, what are desirable.. etc.

I am also used OPs method and it is the reason I now work in a technical job despite having studied art. I just followed my curiosity and that lead to an expert-level understanding in some fields (I later got some formal proof of said expertise).

I don't think that "follow your instinct" is good advice for everyone, but maybe you should understand it more as a "follow your instinct which productive thing you want to do next".

In your examples, writing small programs is the only truly productive thing, the others are consumptive. I learned all I know about programming (I program for a living) from such projects, some of which took weeks of my time. The trick about the instinct thing is that I trust my instincts when I should move to another productive thing that interests me more. So I may be working on a long term programming project, then my instinct tells me when I continue I will start hating it, so I go and work on a hardware project I haven't finished. Before I can switch I need to ensure a state at which I can pick up later on, so I do that before. This way I have a high number of parallel projects each of which is always left in a state where switching between them feels managable.

Of course finishing them is a goal sometimes, but since I am working on many things and always work on the thing that feels good I finish things regularly and have a good time doing it. I also abandon/trash projects, especially if my understanding of a domain has expanded and my initial idea turns out to be misguided. That is okay, I learned something from that which should be your ultimate goal anyways.

I think there's a middle ground between trying to follow a path you set for yourself and thoughtlessly wandering by gut feeling: set a direction you want to go, not a destination.

You'll find that it doesn't require much thought at decision points to choose the options (in aggregate) that push you in that direction. As they say, it's about the journey, not the destination.

With that said, it's still difficult because you have to learn to forego long term expectations and/or acquire discipline not to just "stay put" lest you fall back into the habit of stressing over end goals or the comfort of a stress coping loop (anime, video games, etc), respectively.

Does your instinct really say “watch anime for 6 hours right now”, or does your instinct say something else and you just aren’t listening to it?

Functionally, not completing goals with a long outset is the same as not setting goals. You were banking on completing those goals and not having them just be a myriad of things you've done (which, as you've said, you've already done).

> 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.

Why are you at azure and not at a frontier ai lab?

> Grass is always greener, I guess.

Indeed. Everything has to find their own path.

I am not sure I agree with not having kids being the cause of mid-life crisis. But for balance, as the GP, I will say that I had two kids through the time that I adjusted my approach to life to this less goal oriented approach. They do provide direction to life, make many decisions easier (since I just choose what’ll be best for them) and provide constant distraction from consumption. They also provide an additional tension if you remain goal oriented though since now you have less time to sit and think about your goals and plans and that’s stressful too.

Isn't the stereotypical middle age crisis the suburban office worker husband with two kids who buys a sports car to feel young and free?

How do I find meaning as a child-ful person?

Yeah, but what about your needs?