Wandering Musings on Meaning

Creating a legacy is important to me — I would go as far as to say that creating meaningful things is my highest priority in life. It’s a fairly elusive task, though. You can’t really see what’s important until hindsight.

Instead of ruminating on whether or not I’m working on the right thing, I just force myself to stay focused, and work as hard as I can. Pretty heavy stuff, but the mundane neurotic-ism and anxiety of the general mind tends leads to that sort of heavy thinking often.

Trying my best to do meaningful work is a factor as to why I write here. To create an open archive of my thoughts. Most of the time, the negligible thoughts I have — on their own — aren’t really anything striking. My hope is that the whole — the sum of these parts — would be something worth looking at, something significant.

How lucky it is — to not be victorious.

The Door Closes

There’s an old saying that when one door closes, another opens. It’s an eye-roller — an idiom that people scoff at — and for good reason. I’d like to expand on this metaphor. When that door closes, it can sometimes never open again. And it’s not just the door, it’s where it leads — a place that you would call your home.

Whether it’s by mistake, or even just bad luck, there is heartbreak when that door closes. When you lose the home that you thought you’d die with — your entire identity.

And it can seem impossible or hopeless, when it first happens. The door closes, and you’re locked out. Now what? A change of perspective. In reality, you are surrounded by a neighborhood of doors. This might sound inauthentic or tacky, but it’s true. We have no fixed fate.

— And Getting There

Often, I find myself wondering about the secret to happiness. Plato asserted that only those that live morally virtuous lives were ones that were happy. Aristotle wrote that happiness — human progression — was the only thing that could be valued in isolation. Aquinas believed that God, in His essence, was happiness. Sonja Lyubomirsky found in her studies that, while 40% of our happiness was genetic and 10% was circumstantial, 40% was entirely in our own self-control.

I also think questioning the inverse is just as important: Why are so many people unhappy? There is an abundance of resources in civilization right now that has never been seen before in human history — and yet even with that, pessimism seems easier than optimism.

17 Changes that I’m Making

Around a year ago, I wrote my first real post on Medium. Coincidentally, it was also about New Year’s Resolutions:

https://wandernotebook.com/the-best-time-to-start-a-new-year-s-resolution-is-right-now-ffdd389fbf01

The essential message that I was trying to make was that you don’t need an arbitrary date, like January 1st, to mark that you want to change. You can change — or do new things — anytime you want. And that it was better to do anything at all, than it was to do nothing.

But, looking back on this, I realized that I didn’t go into detail at all with what I truly wanted to accomplish.

Something I have learned the hard way, after trying time and time again, is that you cannot change your entire self.

When I read a lot of self-help articles and books, I often find the author telling the reader the many things that they need to start doing differently. My skepticism makes me often wonder if the author themselves practice what they preach.