Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask, but since I was a teen I’ve always had a weird relationship with the concept of death, and as a result of that, the whole idea of being alive at all has never been an absolute certainty. Which is why I periodically ask myself the question, and so far the answer has clearly always been yes, and that is why I’m still here. Figuring out an answer to this question is often pretty straightforward, and the answer is binary, so there’s no point in discussing it further. The second, and more interesting, question I ask myself is “what kind of life do I want to live?”. Finding an answer to this one is a lot trickier. But one framework I’ve been using lately is to visualise my life as a triangle. I’ll explain what I mean, but I don’t plan to add a drawing so you’ll have to picture this in your head. The first vertex represents the “individual me”. These are all the things that are related to myself as an individual, as if I was existing in a vacuum. Things like health, personal aspirations, dreams and goals, experiences I want to live, skills I want to acquire, my job and so on. I know we don’t really exist in a vacuum, but you get the point. The second vertex is the “social me” which is the collection of things that are related to other people: relationships, responsibilities toward others, shared goals and dreams, and so on. The third and final vertex is reality. It represents the current state of my life at this specific moment in time. These three points are obviously connected; this is a triangle after all, and the distance between them represents how far my current life is from what I want and also how far apart my individual life is from my social life. Those points also define a plane that represents the infinite number of possible lives that are available out there. In a perfect world, this triangle is collapsed down to a single point, because that would mean that there is a perfect overlap between what I want for myself, what I want for my relationships with the other people in my life, and the life I’m actually living. The aspiration is to get to that point, but making the triangle as small as possible is a worthy endeavour. I find this framework helpful because if the goal is to make the overall area smaller, there are a couple of different ways I can go about achieving that. I can try to improve my life and move that vertex closer to the other two; that is one obvious approach. But I can also decide to willingly move one of the other two vertices: I can change my goals and my ambitions, for example, or I can change the people I surround myself with in order to live relationships that are more aligned with the life I want for myself. Or I can combine all those approaches; there’s plenty of flexibility here. What I do know is that lately I felt this triangle grow bigger, which is precisely what I don’t want it to do. But I also lost track of where those dots are, which is also not ideal. It’s funny how there are people who have some things figured out, and I’m sitting here, looking inward, and the more I look, the less all this mess makes any semblance of sense. But I guess that’s part of the fun. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month