Life is not a problem to solve

One of the stranger things about being a person is that we keep assuming there is some final arrangement of life in which all the competing parts of us will reconcile.

We imagine that eventually we will become ambitious enough without being consumed by work, present enough without becoming stagnant, independent enough without becoming lonely, etc.

In other words, we keep trying to solve an equation by eliminating one side of it. That works beautifully in algebra, but life is not an equation.

If you care deeply about your career and your family, there will be moments when those values compete. If you value freedom and commitment, you will periodically resent the obligations you willingly chose. If you are ambitious, there will be days when your dissatisfaction is precisely what moves you forward, and other days when the same dissatisfaction makes you incapable of enjoying a perfectly good Tuesday.

The popular response is usually to identify whichever side is causing discomfort and declare WAR on it. "I need to be more present." "I need to be more grateful." "I need to stop caring what people think." I need to learn to let go."

Unfortunately, the things we resist, persist.

To borrow a phrase from software developers, it’s not a bug in the system, but a feature.

There is no permanent ratio of ambition to contentment that you discover at 32 and then maintain until death. There is no final balance between freedom and responsibility, because the variables keep changing. You get married. You have a child. Someone dies. You get promoted. You get fired. You move. Your body changes. Your priorities change. You become someone who wants different things than the person who spent ten years constructing the life you currently have.

Even if you somehow managed to arrange everything perfectly, life would eventually come along and shake things up.

This is why the obsession with “arriving” is actually a dangerous one. The moment you believe you have finally figured out the correct configuration of your life, you become dependent on that configuration staying intact, and it certainly won't.

The more useful goal is psychological flexibility: being able to respond to the life you actually have instead of demanding that it conform to the version you previously decided should make you happy.

That means accepting that two opposing things can both matter to you. It means tolerating the fact that choosing one value may temporarily frustrate another, because that is life.

Hack of the week: Solve for regret

When you’re stuck between two choices, ask yourself: “Which one will I regret not doing?”

You can usually talk yourself into or out of either option. Regret is harder to bullshit.