What Really Matters?

Welcome to the first blog post of what I hope will be many more to come. If you enjoy this article or have friends who might enjoy it, you can subscribe here. Let's do this thing.

Unstructured Time to Reflect

Every year around the holidays, many of us are fortunate to take a week or so and do as little work as possible. The beauty of having uninterrupted time is that our minds are no longer preoccupied, and we must sit alone with our thoughts.

For many of us, boredom is uncomfortable. It could be that it’s part of our DNA to feel like we need to constantly be achieving something, or perhaps it’s socially ingrained in our culture to feel that rest is for the weak. Maybe we just hate the prospect of sitting alone with our own thoughts.

As technology evolves, and we have more and more things competing for our attention, our time spent being bored is lower than ever; and in turn, creativity and self-awareness suffer. Without time doing nothing, how can our minds wander?

Over the past week or so, like many others, I’ve taken some time to reflect on the past year. Things that went well, things that went… not so well. Relationships deepened, relationships lost. New experiences, and reminiscence on old ones.

I’d like to think that generally I’m pretty self-aware. However, I realized that, unintentionally, I hadn’t spent much extended time alone with my thoughts in months, maybe even years.

Work is an escape. Hobbies are an escape. Music is an escape. TikTok, Netflix, Twitter, Video Games – all of these are escapes from confronting the stark realities of our yearnings & fears deep inside that desperately want to manifest themselves in our lives.

So what do we do? We push them off. We continue to work long hours, we fill our time with anything to keep busy. After all, that’s what all of our successful peers are doing, right?

Keeping busy is not necessarily a bad thing. Too much unstructured free time is a recipe for disaster. However, too little unstructured free time blocks us from understanding what we really want from life, because finding what we really want requires the time and courage for contemplation.

What Do We Want Out of Life?

Before continuing this article, know that I don’t have the answers. None of us do. What we want out of life is different for every person, which is all the more reason we need to figure it out ourselves.

Below is how I've personally been thinking about things. At this point in time, it boils down to a few broad areas – growth, fun, and people.

Growth – whatever it is that I’m doing (let’s call it “work”), I want to be sure that I’m learning, creating new things, adding value to others, and feeling fulfilled. Fulfillment can come through creating something new, having independence & autonomy, helping people, and feeling ownership in what we produce.

Fun – whether in work, outside of work, in hobbies, with friends, enjoying the journey is crucial. There’s type 1 fun – things you enjoy while doing them – but there’s also type 2 fun, or things you enjoy after you’ve finished. Both are important.

Put bluntly, I want to do cool shit – stuff that I’d be excited to tell my friends, parents, or grandchildren about. I want to do things that make me feel alive. That adrenaline rush just before the gun goes off in a race. That nervousness you get before a first date. The blend of fear and excitement before trying something you’ve never done before. The anticipation when you’re in an airplane landing in a place you’ve never been to. The hope and exhilaration for the unknown that is yet to come, but for which you’ll find out very soon just how it turns out. That’s the feeling I want to strive for – to live in the utmost present moment and really feel alive.

People – remember that without people all of the personal growth and cool shit we do in life is pointless. People give it all meaning. Love, trust, heartbreak, happiness, sadness, confusion, surprise. Emotions are a thing because we evolved to interact and bond with other humans.

Well, Mr. Einstein, it did take some deep reflection, but I came to a similar conclusion. Our closest relationships with friends & family, as well as new people we meet every day, add immense depth and meaning to our lives. Relationships give us purpose.

What Makes You Feel Alive?

Personally, there are some things that truly make me feel alive and provide a sense of fulfillment – running, new experiences (new places & new people), and writing.

Up until this point in life, these three things have mostly taken a backseat to career. I subscribed to the narrative that if we focus on career, money will allow us to retire early and do all of these things later.

But the problem with this line of thinking is that life is short. And not only is it short, but the quality of different years of life varies. Only when we’re young and in our physical primes can we push our bodies to their physical limits. Only in our 20s is it “normal” to bounce around hostels and share experiences with strangers in foreign countries. As we age, our priorities and responsibilities change. Jack Raines’ describes it perfectly in his article on the Money Value of Time:

So Why Am I Writing This Blog?

Rather than delay the things that I truly want to do in life, I'm going to prioritize them. By the end of this year, I hope to accomplish a few things that send me in the direction of making the most of my 20s while they're still here:

1. Writing – publish to this blog once per week.

2. Running – run 2,023 miles (because it's 2023, obviously) and set a PR in any distance. The biggest challenge here will be staying healthy.

3. New Experiences – become fully location-independent by the end of this year. Rather than being tied down to one place, the flexibility to work from anywhere is freeing and enables meeting new people and seeing new places.

This newsletter is the start of a personal blog that will be thoughts on all of these things – running, writing, new experiences, and life as a young person just trying to figure it all out. I'll even throw in some takes on current events, startups, the economy, and other cool things I learn about. Publishing publicly will force me to stay accountable.

What will this look like? I’m not really sure. To be honest, I haven’t found a niche yet, and that’s okay. It will probably evolve over time. In any case, it will serve as an outlet to become a better writer, and maybe it will even resonate with some people.

Thanks for coming along for the journey. If you have any feedback or thoughts on stuff you'd like to see, please send it my way!

Let’s choose the former.

– Owen