It’s been shown infinite times that you can’t just sit and rationally figure out what do you wantin life.
There’s always some transcendental unexplainable element to it. Some would simply call it gut feeling, others would refer to religious matters, and some would spend the whole life building a philosophical theory around it. Which in the end will remain just another theory.
So either you stay on the surface like most normal people do and stick to simple, definable goals like family, carrier etc.
Or you embrace the fundamental uncertainty of life and go with the flow.
Or you combine both options together )
- not being forced to work 2/3 of my time
- being able to eat, drink, sleep, be warm at all time
- being able to work on whatever I want, even if it's useless, especially if it's useless
- being able to travel, meet people, have quality time with loved ones (meet more loved ones?)
- not having stress, anxiety and chronic depression
Freedom - I want a life where I am not burdened by pedantic obligations. I want to do what I want, whenever I want, on a whim. Easier said than done, but it seems being a software engineer gets me closer to this ideal than any other job.
Respect - I want people to treat me with respect and just be decent to me.
Understanding - I get a lot of joy out of understanding things. I get goosebumps, the warm fuzzy feeling, shivers down my spine, etc. This can come from work (recently happened while debugging and realizing a huge problem), or reading, or conversation, or even from video games (Outer Wilds recently scratched this itch for me in an awesome way).
If I can live a relatively free life where people are decent to me and I can continue to build my understanding of life, society, and the universe, I'll be very happy.
Unfortunately the "respect" portion is probably the toughest for me, as to get respect from certain folks you have to have external markers of success, like good job, house, pretty wife, kids, etc. I personally don't care too much about any of that shit, but it really gets me down when people are assholes to me, so I do strive to do well in these areas, if only to shut the haters up. I'm also only 25 so who the hell knows what I'll think even a few years from now.
Unfortunately there’s no way to know until you try something, and even then many things require significant time cost which is unrecoverable if I fail. That’s not a problem for something it takes a year or two to achieve, but if something takes 10 years or an indefinite it become as a concern.
Occasionally, I’ll get the thought that I should just settle down with whatever I can get now and make the most of it… then I try to imagine myself 20 years down the line and forget about that.
- start a personal robotics startup.
- start a foundation to solve global poverty.
- write a video game where your enemy player is a neural network that slowly but surely learns how to beat you.
I found that was what I wanted mostly from experience.
* Family (and friends)
Basically an healthy life from all perspectives.