Category: Philosophy

This is the second part in a series of philosophical posts that I started in early 2021, and which I have added to in fits and starts over the last few years.

In Part 1, I started with questioning my inability to fully believe all the feel-good advice about setting aside achievement and “enjoying the moment.” That quickly led down an existential rabbit hole, through some definitions of terms, to the Big Question of “How do I spend my life well?”

After thinking about this a lot (after all, this series of posts has, somehow, taken me several years to write), I find that my answer really boils down to three key points:

• Do good
• Create something
• Have fun

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn. 

Do Good

If the first aspect of a life “well spent” is that we should “do good,” the immediate follow up question is: how much is good enough? Is my life wasted unless I do as much good as possible? Is it morally acceptable to do less? As the lyric from Hamilton goes: 

“And when my time is up / Have I done enough?”

I am very privileged, which means I have a lot that I could give up. If I donated all of my life savings, it could save or change many lives. Is it morally acceptable to keep that for myself? I am still relatively young and relatively healthy, so if I gave up on studying Mars and dedicated my life to service I could likewise have a big positive impact. Is it ethically acceptable to use my skills on something that does not directly address any of the many problems the world is facing? 

Heck, maybe I should run for office so that I can be in a position to enact better policies that would help tons of people. So what if I would hate it, if I could have a big positive impact, then I should do it right? (To be clear, I should not run for office. US politics is not the best place for an introverted atheist scientist.)

Should I give up everything I possibly can to maximize how much I help others? The world might indeed benefit if more of us did that, but it’s a false choice. The only choices are not: (1) Give up literally everything to make the world a better place, but live a miserable life, or (2) Give up nothing and live a comfortable but selfish life. As with everything, the goal is balance. How do we maximize both our positive impact on the world and our enjoyment of life? The optimal solution will be different for different people, but all or nothing thinking is a trap.

(As an aside, because these posts took me a long time to write, I learned long after I had written this part but before I had finished, that the philosophy term for someone who maximizes the happiness that they generate in the world at the expense of their own happiness is a “happiness pump” and it is one of the primary critiques of a purely utilitarian philosophy. There’s a whole episode of The Good Place about this.)

(And another aside: whether we are talking about giving up money, or changing behaviors, it is important to acknowledge the staggering inequality of the world. I can make some difference by donating and recycling and the like, but a billionaire or a corporation could give up proportionally far less and have a far greater positive impact.)

Kieran Setiya discusses this same question – “How do I know if I have done enough?” – in Life is Hard:

…though we know that we have limits, we don’t know where those limits are. The result is that, when I ask myself whether I am doing enough to meet my responsibility for justice, it would be an awfully neat coincidence if the answer were yes. What are the odds that I’ve hit the mark precisely, the most I can expect of myself? Close to zero, I would think. The result is that I am virtually certain that I am falling short. Perhaps it’s obvious that I am. But the same reasoning applies to almost anyone, even those who do much more, people whose lives are devoted to social change. They can’t be sure they’ve done enough. In conditions of profound injustice, we are compelled to doubt that we are living well.

There’s instruction and reassurance to be found in this. We shouldn’t feel too bad that we feel bad: our guilt is not a mistake. More important, we shouldn’t let it put us off, condemning our own efforts as too small. They may be small—but it’s perverse to deal with that by throwing up our hands and doing less. There is value in a single step toward justice, and one step leads to another.

[…]

You may not do enough, but the difference you make when you save a life is the same whether you save one of two or one of two million. A protest may not change the world, but it adds its fraction to the odds of change. It’s wrong to disregard the increments.

It’s easy to tell stories about heroic individuals, and it’s good to take inspiration from those who go above and beyond and do great works, but we don’t all need to be heroes. More to the point, we can’t. As I discussed in my second “Finding Balance” post, we are taught by our very individualistic culture that problems are always solved by heroes: remarkable people who, through sheer force of will, single-handedly change the world. The thing is, most of the problems in the world cannot (and never have been) solved by one person, no matter how passionate or brilliant, no matter how much they sacrifice. If there is a boulder blocking your path, you can recklessly dash yourself against it and have no effect other than hurting yourself. That doesn’t mean don’t try to make things better, it means we need to prioritize sustainable, collective efforts rather than martyring ourselves to a cause in an attempt to single-handedly fix the world.

My conclusion on this question is that the goal is not to do the most good we can at the expense of everything else. The goal is to do good when we can, and avoid bad when we can. Yes, push the limits of what we’re comfortable sacrificing (whether it’s time, effort, money, etc.) but it is ethically acceptable to not be a “happiness pump.” We cannot reasonably expect ourselves or others to be purely dedicated to improving the world every moment of every day. It is ok to do things that make us feel happy and fulfilled, not just things that have a measurable positive impact. Ideally, we can find ways to both have a positive impact and feel happy and fulfilled while doing so. Which leads to…

Create Something

The second aspect of my definition of a life “well spent” is to create something. To quote Hamilton again:

God help and forgive me, I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.

I talked about this already in my second Finding Balance post and probably in other places too: as someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, I want to put something of myself into the world so that when I am gone, some part of me remains. Is this a self-centered, ego-driven impulse? Absolutely. But it’s there, and I don’t think I’m unusual in feeling this way. There is a reason that one of the most famous stories ever told focuses on the choice between living a long, ordinary, but forgettable life or dying young but living forever in legend. The appeal of being remembered is so strong that dying young to achieve it has been a compelling choice for thousands of years:

“My mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive but my name will live forever: whereas if I go home my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.” – Achilles, The Iliad

The Achilles dilemma is not the whole picture though. While there is certainly some amount of ego in the desire to “make a mark,” there is also more to it than just being remembered. It doesn’t have to be about being remembered at all. It can also manifest as contributing to something bigger than yourself, or taking actions that will have effects long after you are gone, even if those actions are known only to yourself.

Writing, raising a loving child, painting, planting a tree, teaching, building. These all are ways to satisfy this aspect of a life well-spent. This quote from Fahrenheit 451 sums it up well:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

While it would be nice to be remembered, that’s not really something I can control. What I can control is whether and what I create. I want to put something of myself out into the world in a way that satisfies me and hopefully connects with others. This will manifest in many different ways, it doesn’t have to be (and probably shouldn’t) be just one big project. Writing is certainly one aspect of this, but so is my scientific work, and so is raising my kids, and many other things as well.

Writing this section has been kind of tricky because this inevitably blends with the other two aspects: Do Good and Have Fun. When we do good, the impact of that action may “ripple” out into the future, having unexpected and unknown effects. Knowing that our good actions propagate is satisfying in much the same way that creating something is, and sometimes Doing Good and Creating Something can go hand in hand. 

But, importantly, Create Something does not have to be explicitly tied up with Doing Good. It often goes the other way and blends with Have Fun. We’re allowed to put a part of ourselves out into the world, even if it doesn’t seem like it benefits anyone. It is ok to create just for the sake of creating something. It doesn’t have to be done to achieve some noble goal. Creation is worthwhile in and of itself because it allows us to share — even in some small, inadequate way — the richness of thoughts and feelings and experiences inside our head with someone else.

Of course at its best, Create Something blends with both Do Good and Have Fun and binds the three together. By creating something, we can enjoy ourselves and (deliberately or not) have a positive effect on the world. Maybe that effect is to tell a story that lets someone escape when they have a bad day, maybe our art inspires others to imagine a world better than this one and work to make that world a reality, maybe it shows someone that someone else out there is going through the same things they are. Maybe by creating something we “just” make ourselves happier and more fulfilled. That’s still a win.

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin

(Don’t just scroll past this video, at least save it to watch later. It’s a really great reflection on creativity.)

Have Fun

“Name one hero who was happy.” – Achilles, Song of Achilles

The third facet of my definition of a life well-spent is to just enjoy life when you can. Life is tragically short, often painful or unpleasant, and ends in sadness and death. The curse of being human is that the same big brains that let us do all sorts of wonderful things also make us aware of future tragedy. 

Eleanor: All humans are aware of death. So we’re all a little bit sad… all the time. That’s just the deal.

Michael: Sounds like a crappy deal.

Eleanor: Well, yeah. It is. But we don’t get offered any other ones. 

– The Good Place

Sibling Dex, to Mosscap the robot: “Your kind, you chose death. You didn’t have to. You could live forever. But you chose this. You chose to be impermanent. People didn’t, and we spend our whole lives trying to come to grips with that.”

– A Psalm for the Wild Built

As I get older, and especially over the last few years as cruelty and pain and suffering in the world have become increasingly impossible to ignore, I have come to appreciate more and more the value of escapism, mindless entertainment, and generally anything that makes people happy. Good food, engrossing stories, games, music, art, watching sunsets, traveling the world, anything that is done for no other purpose than to enjoy it: embrace those things. People talk about “guilty pleasures.” Never feel guilty for finding joy in something. Life is hard enough without punishing ourselves for the things we enjoy.

The closest I have found to escaping the existential dread that is part of being human is to do things that absorb you in the moment and sweep you up in a “flow” state. Things that are so engaging that you can, at least for a little while, shut up the doom-and-gloom voice of the prefrontal cortex and enjoy the present moment.

One of the most reliable ways to end up in a flow state that I have found is to Create Something. Painting, writing, building something, whatever your preferred creative outlet, as long as it can engage your mind fully, it is fun and rewarding.

The other sure-fire way to enter a flow state is through entertainment. In particular, the kind that is often seen as a distraction or self-indulgent escapism. Video games, “guilty pleasure” novels, silly TV shows, sports, movies, etc.

Yeah, life is short and you’re spending some of that precious time watching reruns of that sitcom instead of solving world hunger or whatever. But you know what? You’re not a happiness pump, you’re a human being and you are allowed to relax sometimes. 

Kieran Setiya agrees:

How can we listen to music, or work on the more speculative questions of philosophy and science, while the planet burns? But while political action is urgent, it’s not the only thing that matters. In fact, it couldn’t be. If the best we could do was to minimize injustice and human suffering, so that life was not positively bad, there would be no point in living life at all. If human life is not a mistake, there must be things that matter not because they solve a problem or address a need that we would rather do without but because they make life positively good. They would have what I’ve called “existential value.” Art, pure science, theoretical philosophy: they have value of this kind. But so do mundane activities like telling funny stories, amateur painting, swimming or sailing, carpentry or cooking, playing games with family and friends—what the philosopher Zena Hitz has called “the little human things.” It’s not just that we need them in order to recharge so that we can get back to work, but that they are the point of being alive. A future without art or science or philosophy, or the little human things, would be utterly bleak. Since they will not survive unless we nurture them, that is our responsibility, too.

Or, to put it more concisely:

To be alive: not just the carcass

But the spark.

That’s crudely put, but…

If we’re not supposed to dance,

Why all this music?

– “To Be Alive” by Gregory Orr from Concerning the Book That Is the Body Of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

It is hard to believe but I started writing this series of posts in early 2021! It is now, inexplicably, mid-2025. I have of course not been working on these non-stop, but I return to them now and then to edit and add and tinker. I am not sure I have really figured any of this stuff out – I’m not sure anyone ever fully does, but I decided it’s time to wrap these up and share them.

It’s a new year, and despite all of the craziness of 2020, I find myself in a remarkably similar mental place to where I was last year at about this time. Maybe part of growing older is that year-to-year life is more or less the same, and so my thoughts are basically the same too. I’m stuck in the same ruts, struggling with the same issues, setting the same goals every year. I’m not sure how old I have to be for my regular everyday existential crises to earn the title of “midlife crisis,” but I feel like I’m getting close.

In 2019 I wrote a pair of lengthy philosophical blog posts as I tried to work through some mental health and existential questions. As a recap, in the first post I talked about how the book Feeling Good had helped me recognize that a lot of my mental health struggles could be traced back to a need for approval and an addiction to achievement, which was getting frustrated since I’ve hit the major milestones in my career and life and am now looking ahead to basically more of the same.

In the second post, I talked about insights from some essays by Ursula LeGuin that helped me make an interesting connection between achievement addiction, the myth of the “hero” and the desire for immortality via fame/achievement, misogyny, and taoism. And I concluded that a lot of what I was struggling with was trying to shift away from the “yang”/heroic obsession that our culture prioritizes to something more balanced, more focused on the present than on future goals.

I am pretty proud of those posts. They were difficult to write, but they helped me clarify my thoughts, and they seemed to resonate with many others. They also fit with a growing movement among people of my generation, especially during the pandemic, to challenge the conventional narrative linking self-esteem to productivity. I’m seeing a lot more discussion on social media of self care, more openness about mental health, and an emphasis on simplifying life and living in the moment.

An example is this great article. The whole thing is worth reading, but the key quote is:

“Here’s a secret I tell to my students. I’m going to tell it to you. You aren’t a tool. You are an end in yourself. Meeting your personal goal, whatever that might be, won’t give you one iota more worth than you already have. The purpose you hope to serve will hopefully fulfill you, but has no effect on your worth.

Human worth is contingent upon nothing, and your dreams are separate entities from you.” – Eric Dovigi

Reading those words makes me feel like I can breathe easier for just a moment. Likewise, going back and reading my writing on related topics makes me feel better, at least briefly. 

The problem is that the relief doesn’t last. There’s something about these feel-good ideas that I can’t quite fully believe. It has been nagging at me, and rather than letting it rattle around in my head any longer, I want to pin it down and take a close look at it. So here we go:

What if all of this philosophizing is just an elaborate way to make excuses for not achieving my goals? What if I’m just seeking out affirming messages wherever I can find them to justify the lazier course of action because that’s easier? What if this is what the process of giving up and settling for mediocrity looks like? 

Ouch. With thoughts like that, no wonder I’m sometimes anxious or depressed. These thoughts sound harsh, especially writing them down like this rather than letting them remain semi-abstract in my mind. But unpleasant things can still be true, and I think there is something significant buried in these thoughts that I need to explore.

Why is there this part of me that is so fixated on achieving goals? Why does it sometimes seem like I get more stressed out when I try to follow advice telling me not to work so much, and less stressed when I manage to actually do the work? (But at the same time, trying to be productive all the time is exhausting and burns me out.) Why does being kind to myself and living in the moment and forgiving myself if I am not spending every waking moment on something “productive” feel like giving up or failure? 

As the main character in the book A Prayer for the Crown-Shy says:

“How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?”

At some point, I became obsessed with the idea of “making the most” of my life, of “spending my life well.” There is this piece of me that is afraid of looking back at my life from my deathbed and being disappointed with what I have accomplished. In the book A Psalm for the Wild-Built (to which A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, quoted above, is the sequel), the main character perfectly articulates this idea:

“All I have is right now, and at some point, I’ll just end, and I can’t predict when that will be, and—and if I don’t use this time for something, if I don’t make the absolute most of it, then I’ll have wasted something precious.”

In a culture that values measurable achievement and exceptionalism, I am scared of being just ordinary and forgotten after I am gone. I talked about this before: the appeal of the heroic myth is that it offers a sort of immortality. If you can be a “hero” in the sense of achieving something that leaves a mark on the world, then even after you’re dead, there is something of you left.

And yet, how does that fit with what I’ve written before about the inherent value of human life? If it is true that human life has intrinsic, non-quantifiable worth that we do not need to prove through our actions, then can it also be true that those who achieve more have “better spent” their life than those who achieve little? If it is possible to “better spend” one’s life, then does that mean that those who achieve a lot in life have more worth than those who do not? Written that way it sounds pretty bad. Do I… believe that?

Part of the problem, as always when grappling with big abstract questions like this, is with definitions. Language is an imprecise tool at the best of times, and especially for conveying the ideas involved here. There are a couple of similar but distinct concepts getting blurred together. What does it mean to “achieve” something? What do we mean when we say that a life has “meaning” or “worth” or “value”? As pedantic as it may feel, it’s worth pausing for a moment to pin down some definitions of these terms. Not just the dictionary definition, but what do I actually mean when I use them? 

Value/worth

When I say that all humans have intrinsic value or worth, what I really mean is that I choose to believe that there are basic human rights that everyone deserves. Everyone should have food, shelter, health, education, love, happiness, fulfillment. By “worth” I mean that everyone is “worthy” of these things automatically. As the excerpt from the article above says, “Human worth is contingent upon nothing.” Our achievements or our benefit to society or fame or fortune or race or religion or anything else have no bearing on whether we deserve these basic things.  

This is a definition that I take as an axiom, upon which a lot of my other thinking is based. I have no evidence to support the claim that all humans have intrinsic worth and therefore have certain rights. I want to believe it, so I do. That’s an uncomfortable statement for a scientist to make. But like so much of society, human rights only really exist to the extent that enough of us agree that they exist. I choose to believe that they do because I do not want to live in a world where they do not. (This is discussed quite a bit in the book Sapiens: that human rights, along with other seemingly fundamental ideas like religion, money, and society itself, do not “really” exist, but agreeing amongst ourselves that they do is beneficial in various ways. The author argues that this ability to create and believe in and organize around these abstract concepts is the hallmark achievement of humanity.)

Good

What does it mean for something to be “good”? I try to stick with a relatively simple definition: something is good if it makes the world a better place. In other words, does it reduce the overall amount of suffering? Does it make life more pleasant, more tolerable, more meaningful? Of course the simple definition is anything but. It is easy to fall into the utilitarian trap of trying to quantify goodness and end up paralyzed trying to figure out how to weigh the pros and cons of every action, and its second- and third- and umpteenth-order effects. There is, improbably, a whole TV show about the folly of trying to tally up goodness in this way. In the end, I think you just have to not overthink it. Just do what you reasonably can to help everyone to have the basic rights listed above. Do what — as far as you can tell — is the right thing. Make life better when you can. 

Achievement

Achievement is just accomplishing a task that you set out to do, so achieving something is not in and of itself good. An achievement is only as “good” as its outcome. If you set out to do something bad and succeed, you have achieved your goal but it was not a good way to use your time.

However, there is another dimension to achievement, and that is: how fulfilling was what you did? Maybe you set a goal and achieved it, and it was pretty neutral in terms of whether it was “good” or not for the broader world, but you’re proud of what you accomplished. In other words, it was meaningful to you. I would argue that that was a good use of your time. As the quote from the article above says, achieving your goals does not alter your worth, but hopefully it fulfills you and is meaningful to you. Which leads us to “meaning.”

Meaning

I am not religious. The idea of an afterlife is wishful thinking that people cling to because the alternative is facing the fact that someday we all cease to exist and all of the richness of our internal lives will be lost without a trace. I’m also a scientist, an astronomer posing as a planetary geologist, trained to think in terms of extremely long time scales and vast distances. Humans have existed for a blink of an eye in the history of the universe. We are less than microscopic when compared to the vastness between galaxies. On the scale of the universe we are inconsequential.

With that perspective, it’s easy to jump to nihilism. Everything is meaningless. We live short, pointless lives and then we die and the universe goes on as if we never existed and eventually the universe itself will succumb to entropy and there will be nothing. So what’s the point in caring about anything? It sounds pretty grim, but it can actually be kind of liberating. If nothing matters, why not just chill out, stop writing long blog posts agonizing over existential questions with no good answers, stop worrying about your legacy, and just enjoy your stupid insignificant life while it lasts?

“Dancing through life (down at the Ozdust)
If only because dust is what we come to
Nothing matters but knowing nothing matters
It’s just life
It’s just life
So keep dancing through”

– Dancing Through Life, from the musical Wicked

This is essentially the answer put forward in A Psalm for the Wild-Built. In the book (bear with me here if you’re not a sci-fi person) robots have become sentient and have gone off to live life in the wilderness separate from humanity. The main character of the book, Dex, is having an existential crisis and wanders off into the wilderness too, where they meet a robot named Mosscap who helps them work through these existential questions. The robot’s answer is a sort of positive, comforting spin on nihilism. I’m going to put several quotes from the book here in a row. They’re all in the same section of the book and go together. (They’re also sort of the climax of the book, so if you don’t want it spoiled, scroll past…):

“You [humans] were proud of us [the robots] for transcending our purpose, and proud of yourselves for honoring our individuality. So, why, then, do you insist on having a purpose for yourself, one which you are desperate to find and miserable without? If you understand that robots’ lack of purpose—our refusal of your purpose—is the crowning mark of our intellectual maturity, why do you put so much energy in seeking the opposite?”

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.”

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”

“It doesn’t bother you?” Dex said. “The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?” “That’s true for all life I’ve observed. Why would it bother me?” Mosscap’s eyes glowed brightly. “Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

Or, put slightly differently by Ursula LeGuin in The Lathe of Heaven: 

“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

The attitude is actually very comforting and appealing to me, but as I have written before ultimately I can’t help thinking it’s a bit of a cop-out. It’s true that our lives are short and our significance to the universe is nil, but guess what? The universe doesn’t get to decide what matters. We do. Meaning is a human construct, and therefore it gets defined on our terms.

In the book Life is Hard, philosopher Kieran Setiya talks about this:

while we cannot prove that there is value in the world—at least, not to the nihilist’s satisfaction—that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

He then quotes polymath Frank Ramsey:

“I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities that impress me far more than size does.”

Just throwing our hands up and saying “nothing matters because the universe doesn’t care about us” is a way to avoid the responsibility and vulnerability that comes with choosing for yourself what matters, and then living your life accordingly. In a way, religion takes a different path to end up with the same result. Nihilism and religion are both ways to shift that responsibility elsewhere. Either nothing matters in the big uncaring universe, or someone over-interprets an excerpt from an old book written by ancient superstitious weirdos and tells you what matters. The important thing is that you’ve found a way to not have to choose for yourself.

If I’m not going to choose nihilism or religion, then I need to figure out my own definition for meaning. So what is it? I think Sartre gets it right:

Life has no meaning a priori…It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Meaning is whatever we choose it to be. This definition is frustratingly imprecise, and as intimidating as the blank page before you set down the first word of a novel. Meaning is whatever inspires us with purpose, excites our imagination, whatever satisfies and fulfills us. As Victor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at all costs, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

This, I think, gets at the heart of why I have a hard time with advice to just relax and be mindful and in the moment and stop measuring myself based on my achievements. I feel a constant conflict between the desire to take a break and relax, and the desire to achieve something meaningful to me. The key is to balance those urges. I often forget the key point that my previous posts were not about switching from one way of thinking to another, they were entitled “finding balance.” I find myself trying to overcompensate for a life spent on the achievement-oriented side of things and feel like I need to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side and focus only on living in the moment and the day to day “un-heroic” parts of life. But that’s not balanced either, and it stresses me out in its own way. I need both sides to feel fulfilled. The tension between them is not going to go away and that’s ok. 

So, if I am seeking actual balance, rather than seeking to swing the pendulum from a pure achievement focus to purely living in the present, what does that look like? How do I really “make the most” out of life?  I think about this a lot, but what does it actually mean? I’ll look at that in Part 2.