Apr 6, 2021
#3: What are you doing with your life?
The real question is ‘what are you doing with the time you have alive?’ This question falls into a bigger group of questions about life. Questions we ask ourselves about existence, questions to give us meaning. One of the biggest questions amongst them:
What will make me happy?
A couple of weeks ago, I had a call with one of my best friends. It was about 1 am my time and 7 pm hers. She’d just finished working for the day and she was dissolute. It had been a few weeks since she started working as a software engineer and she was quickly coming to terms with what junior developers learn on their first real job. Working in a real company, building real products, providing real value, is significantly more complicated than all the projects you do while teaching yourself how to code. During your onboarding process, you will be introduced to a large codebase, built on a framework you have no understanding of. There will be lots of folders containing lots of files that you simply can’t rationalise.
What does what? Which function is being called? Where is it being called from? What is this? Why is that? What exactly am I supposed to be doing?
From there, it’s very easy to start to doubt yourself. To doubt that you are qualified for your job, that you are meant to be in the place you have found yourself. Soon after, impostor syndrome sets in and every day, you think that this is the day you will be exposed for the fraud you are.
This is how my friend was feeling the day we spoke and as we did, as we spoke, I wanted to comfort her in some way. I didn’t know how I would do this. One thought did come to my mind, the thought of how the stress of the day had upset her so much that it was eating into her evening. So when it came time for me to talk, I told an anecdote about the President of a country.
I said, imagine a president of any country, who is receiving a lot of hate and backlash from the citizens. His country has come under recent fire, there are a lot of things wrong. Maybe there has recently been a terrorist attack even. Whatever the case, in this hypothetical situation, this president has his hands full with things to do. I said to my friend that when night time came, the president wouldn’t be thinking of what to say to the citizens, he’d be with his family, tucking his children into bed, spending time with his wife, doing the things not afforded to many other people in the country. Because no matter how important we think work is, it’s not the most important thing to us. to most people.
What will make me happy?
For today’s essay, I read How will you measure your life by Clayton M. Christensen for the Harvard Business Review. In this essay, he broke down a model he taught Harvard grads about life. After spending a semester lecturing about management, on the last day, he prompted students to look at themselves and attempt to answer three questions.
- How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
- How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
- How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?
He sprung these questions up much in the same way he applied concepts in management. As with a story he told about being called in by Andy Grove of Intel, the idea wasn't to propose solutions or insights but to teach thought models that helped people arrive at those solutions themselves. These questions were to do the same for the students.
I liked that in his questions, he separated the happiness you get in your career from the happiness you get from family. Because when we ask ourselves these questions, what will make us happy, we don’t often ask it with any qualification as specific as this. It’s easy to look at your life now or at any point and to believe that happiness will come from some career-related achievement. In school, you read hard for your exams because you believe good results will bring you happiness. In reality, that answer is true. For the time being, it will give you happiness. But the happiness we get from career-related goals or similar achievement-based happiness are ever fleeting. And at the end of your life, all those little happiness you’ve experienced will be nowhere in your memory. I think it’s unlikely that on your deathbed, you will look back on your career achievements and think to yourself ‘yes, I lived a happy life.’ Clayton made this point in talking about the second question. He made examples to the many people he knew who had gone through failed marriages and had strained relationships with their children. Their work-life was great, there were creating immense impact in business. Clayton even made note of himself. He told a small anecdote of recently discovering that he had cancer and how that shifted the way he thought about life. His ideas have earned many companies lots of money but facing his mortality, none of that meant anything to him. It was a profound way to examine what really made him happy, it wasn’t career success. Not in that way.
What will make me happy?
I don’t have any real answer to this question. I am starting to believe there is no actual answer because the question is not a good one.
One way in which I have been thinking about the type of happiness we tell ourselves that we seek is that it is not at all happiness we are looking for.
What we are in fact looking for is the privilege to want fewer things. Or in another way, to have the things we currently want. I want to want fewer things/ I want to have more things.
This is not happiness at all because for as long as you are wanting things, you will never really be happy.
As a result, I have been trying to restructure how I think about enjoying life. In a journal entry I wrote a few weeks ago, I broke down the things I wanted to do with my life currently into three simple groups.
- Do work I enjoy
- Spend time with the people I love
- Earn money
There are many things I want in each of these groups. I want to create work that reaches more people. I want to find romantic love and I want to earn money. But wanting, wanting is no way to find happiness.
Love. This is the note I will end this essay on (because my life revolves around love: creating it, longing for it and spreading it.) Love is one of the things I have always wanted. Romantic love. For a small period in my life, I had it and it was everything I dreamt it to be. I think I live a romantic life and I don’t want to live it alone. The thing about this is that I don’t have much luck with it. I haven’t liked many people in that way in my life. I have given up on love multiple times because I am much better at friendship. This I truly believe, I am much better at being a friend than I am at being a lover. At some point in 2020, I remember thinking to myself that I should perhaps take the search for love thing seriously. That the next time, I saw an opportunity to pursue love, that I should take it intentionally. That if I liked someone, I should act on it. I almost made it a new year resolution but I didn’t. Entirely because I am a coward. I didn’t want to commit to such a thing. Why? I don’t know. I am too afraid to maybe.
These days, I am finding happiness in intentional friendships rather than in seeking romance. Although I do long greatly for it. I suppose that’s the thing about being human. While happiness isn’t to be gotten from wanting, it doesn’t stop us from wanting what we don’t yet have, believing it will make us happy.
