Spoken about in The Dream State of Software, Paul of Dune has a moment where he’s both past and present in his mind. He doesn’t know even whether he’s had his kid or not.
In a podcast I listened to lately on happiness, one suggestion was to write out all your goals and cross them off from day one. Pretend like it doesn’t even matter if you accomplish them. This helps free you.
Careers are like both of these things. We want everything. We can pretend like we have it. We can come to terms with it. And we can say “doesn’t matter if I don’t get that, because I’ve got a life outside my career.”
Consider your career from your deathbed (My Tombstone). What path did you take that mattered? What were all the alternate realities and multiverses you could have had.
Put them all together. In one multiverse you’ve been fired. In another you end up getting insanely wealthy. In another you start your own company. In another you become an online blogger.
All of them can’t be true when you do this exercise extensively enough. And choosing which one probably doesn’t matter as much (right vs wrong path thinking). If you’ve ever left a job you realize that nothing really comes over with you. Most relationships at work are short lived and contextual, like your relationships in high school. And that’s life.
Happiness is perhaps being okay with not having everything you desire, except for the few things that are truly attainable: peace with God, self, and cherished relationships.
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Bryan lives somewhere at the intersection of faith, fatherhood, and futurism and writes about tech, books, Christianity, gratitude, and whatever’s on his mind. If you liked reading, perhaps you’ll also like subscribing: