End of year
Reflections
Another year draws to a close and it seems to have a huge effect on me this time. I think after 2 years of feeling a dramatic lack of control over time with COVID, the inverted sense of agency of this year made me expect more from myself. Sadly the increased optionality was dampened by the hangover of changed(read arrested) metabolism, both physical and mental.
Despite that, I’d say this year, post getting married, I wrote more, ate better, worked better and strove harder. Yet, such is the nature of desire, that deficits and regrets scream louder, creating rallying cries to do more and be more.
Those cries are met with such a weird conceptual hang-up of my mind. I often find myself feeling like I’m in a state of limbo. If there’s just 20 minutes left before a meeting, I can’t start a new task because new tasks should need more time. Since there’s only 10 days left before the vacation, I won’t restart working out, since this won’t make much of a difference anyway
.
It is probably this strange sense of partitions on time, that the end of the year more meaningful to me. The good thing is, I’ve had a tremendous urge to reflect on the year, and plan for the next, perhaps more than ever before in my life.
Perhaps because after a long time, I’ve run out of external goals. I don’t have a semester in college to complete, no job to find, no city to move to for a lover, no wedding to complete. In some sense, I’m free from expectations of the world. What I do with the next year is totally upto me! I get to choose my goals now with absolute, unprecedented freedom. Sure, other factors like where my wife lands a job will require run-time adapting, but what I do is really up to me.
What does one optimize for, given this much leeway?
I’ve noticed how if I let my mind run free, I day dream the simplest things. Mostly hanging out with people. But, I’m usually richer, more successful, and possibly thinner in those dreams. All this time, I’ve thought that there’s my desire! Needless to say, the targets of my dreams are moving ones. There’s an inflation adjusted 30% YoY growth that my dream self’s wealth seems to show.
That can’t be it!
As a substitute for ambition, I’ve always espoused a trite truism, i.e. “I’ll make myself better, and better things will come to me”. I like telling that to people when they ask me what I’m aspiring for because that absolves me from accountability over concrete goals. To be fair, it’s also a sensible way to look at things because achieving concrete goals has a reasonable amount of luck involved and I don’t want to sit and discern whether it was me or the hand I was dealt at the end of the year. However, the disingenuity of this slight of hand(mouth?) reveals itself in how terrible our minds are at tracking and rewarding incremental progress. I’ve tried but I can’t seem to feel “good” about how I’m “better than my previous self from a year ago”.
So how does one aspire for the future, given these constraints:
You can’t be certain what happens. If you attach too much meaning to goals, you may feel bad even if you fall short of them for reasons outside your control.
Progress in personal capacities, is hard to measure and feel good about.
There are 2 competing things to optimize for, capacity to complete goals, and a goal itself. Do I care about being a guy who can do things or be a guy who did a thing.
Perhaps, it shouldn’t be treated as one or the other. Training to be better, will enable better outcomes. And striving for better outcomes, will lead to my pushing myself in ways I’d otherwise not do. Contests need to be interspersed healthily with training.
The unusually high anxiety of this year’s closing makes me ask, what do I care about?
I feel like, the thing I desire most for the coming year is the state of flow. And this is not the state of Hyperfocus of creative output. I find that in all my pursuits, material or otherwise, an enormous amount of energy is dissipated due to friction inside of me. So far, it has felt that a lot of that friction is some manifestation of fear. I imagine that without that friction, the entire process from deciding to work on something, to getting it done, should become effortless.
This year, I hope to become someone who is intentional about what they want to do, and then effective at doing it.
This is a hard to measure thing in and of itself, so it’ll make sense to list out behaviors and habits that I think will help me achieve this state and work backwards.
But more on those, later…
Thanks for reading!
I don’t know what direction I’ll take this outlet of writing next year! I’m not sure if these pieces around my own feelings make sense to most people or do anything for them! My intention has been to articulate my own self in a way that others with similar predicaments may find their feelings crystalized into words. The assumption is that my experiences aren’t too unique. Please let me know what you think about this.
Wish you a Happy New Year!
PS: Again, the art in this article is from DALL-E
Hope to see you writing super regularly! Even if it's just your close circle that reads, being able to think about, ruminate and articulate your thoughts in written form has a magical feel to it.
"Since there’s only 10 days left before the vacation, I won’t restart working out, since this won’t make much of a difference anyway"
The way I go about dealing with this exact same feeling is by thinking: "Most New Year resolutions fail, that's a fact. So if I don't want to fail, I should probably not do this as a New Year thing but something that I'd do anyway" and that just motivates me to start right away instead of waiting for later.
Give us one more post before the end of the year :)