Turns out I was a few letters off.
About 6 months ago I left my full-time job and insisted that I was now retired. The app I built nights and weekends was now comfortably paying my bills and growing at a steady pace.
The goal was to pick up hobbies. Read more. Write better. Find god.
So I looked.
I did all the things my college career center told me not to. Made games. Wrote non-erotic non-poetry for the erotic poetry club. Updated my Hinge job to “culture hire” and “mail thief” just to see how people would react. Bought tickets to Asia on a 2 day notice. Took cooking classes. I even hired a paid intern just to build the dumbest thing I could imagine.
It took all of a month of goofing off to realize that given the opportunity to do anything at all, all I wanted to do was:
God wasn’t at Machu Picchu or the writing club. But there were glimmers of him at early morning bottomless brunch, and late nights trying to breathe a new project into existence.
…I spent another 2 months trying to prove this theory wrong. Mostly because it felt like so unsatisfying as a conclusion. “Happiness was inside of you all along”. Really? If this was somebody else’s blog post I’d be rolling my eyes and clicking back to scroll onto the next thing.
But there’s gotta be a reason so many people that folks that get great at a profession keep doing it even after they no longer ‘have to work’¹. Why do founders that exit their first company immediately go back to chewing glass.
The metaphor I’ve always had in my head about life was pushing a rock up a hill. Except you’re not sisyphus so the rock doesn’t roll back down. Instead you pat yourself on the back, celebrate a bit. Then look around and start pushing a rock up the next hill.
I used to view this pattern as with disdain. No matter what you accomplish, you quickly get accustomed to that level of attainment. Then you start to invent new problems for yourself. And no matter how many hills you climb, there’s always someone more accomplished than you.
There’s a million better metaphors invented about the futility of chasing attainment. Hedonic treadmill. Keeping up with the joneses. Basically any moderately edgy piece of media that touches on adult life in the US.
Except at some elevation the rock pushing starts to become fun. The challenge and the familiar in your arms of pushing the rock starts to feel enjoyable.
You push a rock to the top and get rewarded with currency. At the next hill you’re invited to a club for people that have climbed it. Someone asks you about your rock-pushing technique, and you get a warm glow from the admiration. You start attending poker games with fellow moderately accomplished rock pusher.
Ignore the LinkedIn invites from anyone advertising elite rock-pusher communities