My life plan

July 23rd, 2009 John Hill Posted in Happiness, My life, goal setting |

One side effect of having been so depressed that I considered suicide is that I find it very hard to get motivated by “ordinary” work. I see life as a maze with doors. Behind some doors are rooms that change our lives so much that there is no way to go back and forget that room. Being depressed is one such room, especially if you have to seriously consider suicide as an option to escape.

I feel fine now, but I had to rebuild all my values from nothing. I have dreams and goals. I have motivation. Unfortunately “keep working as nothing has happened” isn’t on my list. I can barely fit in “keep working because you have to get money”, but at the same time I know that every hour of my current work is away from my more important goals.

Why don’t I quit my daily job and start doing what I want? First, there is the money issue that I can’t escape (it would be unfair to ask my family to support me). Second, what I want to do may not be possible or it may take years to achieve. I better have a plan that includes the income aspect too. Third, I know that I may not want what I think I want. I think it would be unwise to commit 100% if I am not sure that I want what I get in the end.

This is my current plan

Goals

GOAL 1: Enough free time to exercise, cook healthy food (that’s paleo for me), learn new things, spend time with family and relax. This is where my biggest dissatisfaction is today. I really don’t see how yet another version of a software product will make any difference. Still I am spending 7.5 hours per day plus commute on developing it. At the moment I don’t have enough time to exercise as much as I want. Finding time to cook healthy food every day is also difficult. My family would also benefit from some extra time.

Having enough time outside work is one thing. Then there is the work itself (that’s the “learn new things” part). I would love to work with big global issues, but unfortunately I know hardly anything about climate, peace, welfare or medicine. I can’t switch to another more meaningful job (that would provide our family enough income) because I don’t have the competence and education. Sure, I could easily find low paying meaningful jobs, but that would affect my family more than I think would be fair.

There are many ways to get to the point where I would feel I have enough of everything. One simple option would be to get a raise and cut my working hours. Another thing that would help is living closer to office, so I could run there. These options don’t really address the work itself, but for now may be the only realistic options. One (unrealistic?) option might be playing poker as professional (I don’t yet have the skills and experience, but I am getting there).

GOAL 2: Enough passive income to quit my job. I have so many things I would love to do, but unfortunately I don’t see these generating much income. They may, but I can’t count on that. There are many ways to generate passive income. For me the most promising are blogging, stock photography and investments. These are all very long term options. Currently I earn negative income with these…

I have couple of web sites and I have started selling my images, but so far it doesn’t look too good. Hopefully things will change in the future!

GOAL 3: To live forever. What??? I can see you thinking I am nuts, but listen for moment. Aging related research is advancing all the time. We can keep alive older and older people all the time. Think what would happen if you could be “guaranteed” life expectancy of 80 years and by the time you reach 80 you could be guaranteed 85 and by 85 it would be 89 and finally when you are 89 it would be 95. Notice that from 85 to 89 it’s 4 years, but you get 6 years more! That’s the point when you may very well have escaped death (assuming that the progress of science stays good). Would you change your life somehow if you believed there’s even 1% likelihood that this will happen? What about 10% chance?

I intend to live healthy life and see what happens (that’s about all it requires from us mortals, at least for now). It doesn’t cost me anything, because I anyway wish to live as long active life as I can. I hardly remember last 12 years (and that’s a good thing). By living a long life “my dark years” will be smaller part of the whole.

GOAL 4: Enough meaningful relationships. I am introvert and I like to know fewer people, but know them better. I also prefer being with one or two people at a time instead of in bigger social gatherings. I have no idea how many close friends I would like to have and who they would be. All I know is that during my depressed years I lost contact with almost everyone. Now it’s time to rebuild.

Process

Currently I am ”tasting” different things I think I want in my life and at the same time I am refining my plan for making my life “perfect”. I think “perfect” is anyway a moving target that gets changed by my life each and every day. I experiment with many things and adjust my priorities based on how things progress. Basically I am trying to find the easiest path to achieving my goals. Sometimes I invest time in poker, sometimes in photography. This post is also part of one experiment (”Write every day for 30 days and see what happens”).

I don’t believe in sharply focused goals and exact planning because things usually change and look different when I get closer to them in real life (instead of in my imagination). Complex and accurate life plans remind me of “waterfall” design method used in product development. The idea is to first specify what is needed. Next step is designing how to get it, then implement the design. Finally you test to see if the specification is satisfied. This methology is old and mostly abandoned because in real life it’s usually bad idea to plan ahead too much because we start to understand things only when we see something concrete. These days product development uses methods that first produce some subset of the whole and then uses that to guide design of next more complete iteration. I think life planning should be done the same way: step by step moving forward and all the time evaluating things. Are you going to right direction? Do you really want what it seems you will soon get? Are there ways to get a taste of things with small investment of your time and money, so you could guide your journey better?

About happiness

My goals don’t include happiness explicitly. That’s because I think happiness is independent of any goals. I should be able to be happy even if I am dissatisfied with my job.

I think in terms of total happiness. Here is the equation: TOTAL_HAPPINESS = HAPPY_MOMENTS * TIME.

HAPPY_MOMENTS measures how often I have moments when I can honestly say I am happy and how happy those moments are.

TIME is just what it is.

To maximize total happiness there are three options: (1) Be happy more often. (2) Have more intense happy moments. (3) Live longer.

For geeks: Total happiness is of course integral of momentary happiness events over time, but I am simplifying here a bit. Each happiness moment or event also extends in time to both directions (think of concert: you feel happiness because of it before and after the actual musical performance)

I think it’s ok to be less happy than would be possible for some time if that buys you greater happiness later. That way the total happiness may be maximized without trying to feel every moment as happy as possible.