Thinking About Trajectory
# Introduction
I’ve never really felt more comfortable and peace with feeling lost and “directionless” than I am right now. Attempting to get out of/escape this feeling has made me realize that being lost in a sense, is kind of a blessing, an oppurtunity to grow out of personal beliefs about yourself and rediscover/carve yourself into someone your liking.
I’ve recognized, that atleast with me, when we feel lost or derailed we try and reset ourselves to the person we believe ourselves to be. it’s almost paradoxical, we try to go back to the system that was previously responsible for us feeling lost. its almost as if the fear of being lost isn’t necessarily a fear of being lost, but rather a fear of rediscovery and detachment from ourselves. But in order to get to a “better” place than the one we came from, you’ve gotta know what better looks like, or optimizing for which of the variables will lead you to that place.
The process of trying to get back to baseline and constantly failing was a frusturating one, but somewhere along the way I started looking at my life as an experiment with various factors and variables and tweaking them to test hypothesis about myself.
# Optimizing For Joy
Oddly i’ve always considered optimizing for Joy as a negative. My mentality was usually based on doing things the hard way, and doing things that made me miserable because thats what “grit” and “hustle” was. Optimizing for joy had always seemed synonymous to giving up or quitting. I talked about something similiar in my article about a crappy burnout i had. I think I had the terms joy and instant gratification mixed up in my head.