i’ve made some strange life choices (strange to what was deemed acceptable in the world i existed when those choices were made). i’m often asked (or sometimes just treated differently) why i made those choices.
to answer, i have some rhetorical questions back:
what do you want out of life?1
and how do you get it?
pinker and naval ravikant both claim (and i believe them) that intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life. but knowing “what to want” is an even bigger intellectual conundrum. i mean.. if you’re smart why are you not happy??
so do i know what i want?
i’ve already lived at least half of my life, im successful by most measures of success, i’ve fulfilled the purpose of my life by creating my progeny and bringing him up singlehandedly, i enjoy the freedom i relentlessly pursued since i came of age, and i’m in good health. i’ve travelled, learned cultures, assimilated, read history, philosophy, spirituality, and science, made love to women, wrote poetry, loved, lost, and won it all back again several times over. but i’m human, i’ve made mistakes that i cannot walk back, and i have regrets.
given all that, what do i want from the rest of my life? continue to overspecialize in data engineering? deploy ai agent swarms? retire and enjoy?
look at that picture again. life is chaos theory in action. one tiny flutter of your butterfly wings, one ridiculous decision, is all it takes. and yes, i know precisely what i want knowing very damn well that serendipity doesn’t exactly favor precision.
if the answer is happiness you’ll never find it. the way human mind works, you cannot go after happiness, find it, and be happy. what we often chase, find, and misinterpret as happiness is pleasure. it’s the release of dopamine. the experience of it doesn’t last. all of human knowledge points to happiness as the state when you’re deeply aware of yourself, to go after your true mission, without being attached to outcomes and expectations - if that helps answer the original question what do i want.