Dealing With Feeling Lost In Life

I had a crisis during my first year of working. Life felt like it was on a loop (work, eat, sleep, repeat). I spent most of my waking hours at work, and I was increasingly disappointed with how it was going.

In the last two years of university I was so driven by the goal of getting a 'good job' out of graduation (interview prep, studying, online courses) that once I got out of university and started working all I could think to myself was "is this it?".

I've been able to somewhat overcome this with a lot of reading and self-reflection, so I'm going to share the conclusions I drew here.

Honing In On Passion With Ikigai

I suffered from chronic generalism.

I've always had a broad interest and curiosity across many topics like software, business, fitness, music, gaming, art and fashion.

Being a generalist frustrated me at times because I felt (key-word echoing imposter syndrome here) like I wasn't an expert in any particular field and so it must have meant that I hadn't found the 'right thing' for me.

I came across the concept of ikigai - a Japanese philosophy describing finding your sense of purpose. Your ikigai is something which hits the following four criteria:

1. What you love
2. What you are good at
3. What you can be paid for
4. What the world needs

I highly recommend doing this exercise of filling in the Venn diagram to find your own ikigai.

As corny as it sounds, 'building software' is an ikigai for me.

I'd been so disillusioned by the grind of constant learning that I almost forgot that I did enjoy the building process. This would have been obvious from the outside watching me easily slip into the flow state coding for hours on end.

I'm still not sure if it's something I can see myself doing for the rest of my life, but this evaluation gave me reassurance that what I'm currently doing is meaningful enough for me.

If you still haven't found something you 'love' (which is a strong word), I would recommend you to either:

• Reflect again on what you do already and why you do it. For example, gaming or music production would have been passions of mine in the past given the amount of time I spent on them.
• Keep exploring and putting in effort into things you see yourself being interested in or getting better at. This is currently my focus. Cal Newport's book "So Good They Can't Ignore You" describes the idea that instead of trying to find your passion and committing to it, people usually become passionate after they've become good at it. Someone who owns a manufacturing business may not have necessarily been passionate about the intricacies of manufacturing when they first started, but likely became more passionate over time as they grew and saw results.

Of course, I do feel that tying your entire identity to any single 'passion' is suffocating. But it's a useful framework when it comes to finding what you'll be spending most of your valuable time alive working on.

The Importance of Establishing Your Why

[One] who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how

I read this in the book "Man's Search For Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a psychiatrist recounting his experience as a Holocaust survivor. He details stories about how the prisoners in concentration camps who had a strong sense of purpose or will to survive were best able to cope with the harsh reality they lived in. This helped me re-affirm a few things.

1. Most of the problems and pressures I've put on myself are meaningless in comparison
2. It's important to remember why you're doing something

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, my 'why' right now is to get to a stage where I'm comfortable financially and career-wise so that:

1. I can support myself and my family
2. I can focus on doing work that I'm excited about rather than worrying about money or reputation

Trust The Process, Not The Money

I'm still continuing to come to terms with my increasingly warped relationship with money.

It's difficult to not feel inadequate seeing young superstars at the top of their career or running successful businesses and ask yourself what you're doing wrong.

But ultimately this is non-productive. Instead of wasting a significant amount of my time worrying about this, I want to simply trust the process of getting extremely good at what I do, chasing my curiosities, and seizing opportunities when I see them.

I like Margaret Zhang's (youngest Editor-In-Chief at Vogue) quote in this interview: "It’s about your real skills at the end of the day. Somebody might win short term because they can talk the talk, but if they don’t have real skills, they’re going to fail immediately".

Finding Satisfaction Outside Of Work

ThePrimeagen (an engineer at Netflix and content creator) mentioned this when addressing burnout for software engineers: "Are you trying to get more than just simple satisfaction of your job? You will not get that validation. Are your expectations all misaligned?".

It resonates with me because I've had to relearn to enjoy the process of finding satisfaction outside of work:

• Enjoying building and writing for the sake of it
• Indulging my creative spirit through consuming music, TV shows or movies without feeling guilt about wasting time
• Continuing to learn and geek out over businesses or new innovations without putting myself down
• Engaging in my hobbies without expecting a particular outcome

Death

I hope that years from now I can look back at this post chuckling at how melodramatic I was knowing that I've actually done my best and made an effort to enjoy the journey.

Ultimately, we're all just monkeys on a rock floating through space. Most of what I do isn't life-changing nor life-threatening. As morbid as it sounds, I'll die one day and future generations won't care about what I did.

So don't put so much pressure on yourself like I do (easier said than done!).