Untangling for the end-of-year stretch

2022 has been a year of significant change and instability for me. I have:

• Moved to a new city, facing new logistical challenges
• Explored new groups and made new social connections
• Attended multiple speed dating events and started using dating apps seriously
• Hosted and organized social events
• Learned about and considered joining a mentorship-based network marketing community that has a decent following locally
• Gotten heavily addicted to Brazilian Zouk and started investing significant time and money and traveling to attend dance festivals
• Been volunteering as a peer support person at a mental health ward
• Experienced significant relationship challenges with my boss and volatility in my work and viability of continuing in my current job
• Started job hunting for basically the first time in my professional career, with nothing to show for it yet
• Gotten sick four times this year, for a minimum of two weeks at a time
• Lost a lot of physical strength and am trying to regain it at the gym
• Learned a bit more about Effective Altruism and potential career aspirations
• Been rocky this whole year about my finances and ability to afford a mortgage needed in December, given the unending rises in interest rates during this 15 month wait for settlement
• Started dating someone with life partner potential and am navigating the unfamiliar dating life, with plenty of logistical volatility in sight for the short term
• Visited Australia and am convinced that life in Australia is a desirable no-brainer upgrade compared to life in NZ.

Around March, I had drafted a list of ambitious goals for the year, even twice as ambitious as my goals in 2021. Those goals fell by the wayside mainly due to work/economic instability and the emergent urgency of finding a new job or changing my work conditions. On some level, I felt powerless about my goals and was surprised by how easily my ability to achieve them were diminished greatly by job uncertainty as well as the unexpected challenges of adapting to a new city. I didn’t beat myself up for needing a lot longer to adapt and learn about these new life challenges, but all the same it has been a shocking lesson on the value of having stability in life.

Moving from my small world hometown to a more ambitious and open-minded city has resulted in an expansion of my world of ideas and possibilities. Visiting Australia has contributed to that too. Growing a longer list of wants and needs and aspirations and possibilities while maintaining an internal locus of control on these new vast expanses has been met with some degree of stress response on my part. I feel like I don’t have enough time to do everything that I want to do, that I’m in a race against time, and the casualty if I don’t win that race is living a life that is inconsistent with my values and beliefs. My goal for writing this post is just to help myself get to the bottom of my fears and concerns so that I can acknowledge them and put them to bed and gain clarity on my approach for the rest of the year.

Random list of fears and concerns:

• My biggest fear that comes to mind is not being able to live with myself due to not living the next year or so in a way that is true to what I believe in and am capable of.
• I’m afraid of time passing by wasted by not spending it on intentional things, or by my willpower being too weak to resist bailing on hard things due to believable excuses.
• I’m concerned about how to balance time spent with my girlfriend in terms of quality and quantity while not diverting from my short term and long term life goals.
• I’m concerned that I’m not spending enough investing my learning potential. That is, time spent on knowledge/skill/productivity learning as opposed to time spent on material/sensory/social experiences, where I consider that the former is the right focus for exponential growth. I’m not doing enough to cultivate exponential growth.
• Just like I was caught off guard by how hard it was to move city or face job uncertainty or be sick so much this year, and those acted as strong temporary blockers of visible progress towards my life goals, I’m afraid of other things cropping up like that, such as health issues.
• I’m afraid of taking inefficient paths and getting distracted by the wrong things only to discover much later that the obvious paths were indeed the correct paths.

If a friend approached me with what I’ve written above, seeking reassurance, what would I say to them?

Wow, those are a lot of challenges you’ve faced this year, and it doesn’t sound easy, so kudos to you for that and still wanting to take on more. Regarding the success that you’re aiming for in life, I don’t know exactly how one gets there, but from what I’ve heard, it’s never a straightforward and linear journey with clear direction and answers all along the way. Highly successful people often have stories that leap all over the place, where it sounds like the way they navigated their life choices and opportunities and major events was more like a creative process. When you don’t have perfect information within a world that is full of endless possibilities, more than anyone can truly ever grasp, instinct, creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation can all take you to worthwhile places compared to having a theoretical plan and trying to ignore everything else. As for the success stories out there that sound pretty one dimensional or like it came out of nowhere, often it just took someone decades to get good at one thing, and eventually one lucky opportunity to go big showed up, and their success was really made possible from all the slow boring development that they had done up to that point.

Whether you choose a more creative approach that takes you from one thing to another, or a steadier approach where you work on getting good at one area for a really long time, the important thing is to trust in the process. If you work on something consistently for a really long time, it is an inevitable thing that you’ll get better at it. Everyone has different timelines so you don’t know when you’re going to succeed in that thing, but there is no particular reason why you won’t succeed within anything that you put enough of your time and dedication into. And you have your whole life ahead of you to figure out what works for you.

Perfect does not exist so forget about having a perfect journey or plan. Even if a perfect plan existed, it would literally be impossible for you to follow it. Your circumstances and your path is going to be unique. Allow yourself to be on that unique journey at your unique pace.

Failing and making mistakes is how you learn and grow; don’t be afraid of that. Invest in your potential by focusing on the process. Don’t fixate on visible rate of progress and exact achievements for things that are outside of your direct control. Commit to the process and to the inputs that you can control and hold yourself accountable to and don’t sweat about the rest. Know that you’re going to be okay. Remember that you’re loved and enough as you are now, that you have nothing to prove and no obligation to the world, simply choice as to how you want to live your life. Everything will come in its time. Submit yourself to the journey, be proud of your humanity, and enjoy the journey through both triumphs and struggles.