I have been thinking about my own journey and how it would be a good idea to share it here on the blog. I’ve talked about it in other posts but this time I’m focusing specifically on the paths that I chose/found myself on.

The Good Boy Path

As a middle class Indian boy who did well at school, I was born into a path. I was always going to be either an engineer or a doctor. It never even occurred to me that I could choose something else. Incidentally, my favorite subjects were literature, languages (English and Hindi) and the social sciences (history, geography, civics). But “arts” was for students who weren’t smart enough to do science.

This well worn path goes like this: become an engineer, get a good job, find a good wife, have kids, send them to a good school so they can become engineers or doctors and get a good job and find a good husband/wife and have kids and so on and so on. The Great Indian Middle-Class Intergenerational Dream.

Sailing Detour

I didn’t want to dissect frogs in highschool so I decided to become an engineer. But I had enough self-awareness to realize that a normal 9 to 5 job would bore me to death so I chose Marine Engineering instead of the much more lucrative IT/Computer Science and unknowingly set myself on a slightly tangential path.

Most of my batchmates realized that sailing is not the best career for starting families and so they did MBAs after a few years and got back on the old path. I liked the freedom and lack of routine and had no interest in getting married just for the sake of it.

So I could have continued on this path but I didn’t feel fulfilled. Life felt meaningless and so I made my first big decision and chose a path that claims to be less traveled but is getting quite well worn in our modern times.

The Follow-Your-Heart Path

I blame Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist for this foolish decision. I read that book in the first year of my college and I developed a strong belief in the book’s core message: if you want something from the bottom of your heart, the whole universe will conspire to help you get it.

I didn’t just think that this was true, I believed in it with all my heart. And after sailing for 5 years, I took the leap of faith and quit sailing to pursue my passion which at that time was writing.

There are many reasons why this advice is flawed but this isn’t the post to discuss all that. I just want to say that after following this path I’ve understood a few things:

1. You don’t discover your passion, you develop it. Passion is just interest that is fed time and energy to grow into a passion.
2. Passion is definitely not ‘the thing you were meant to do’ that once discovered will make everything else super easy.
3. Achieving success in any creative field is much more difficult than building a career.

Anyways, what’s important for this post is that even following my heart failed to make me happy. In fact, it made me depressed because if I couldn’t be happy following my own heart, then what the hell was wrong with me?

Sitting Down on the Side of the Road

I had always suffered from a mild depression because of various emotional and family issues but I had managed to hide it and remain functional. After 5 years of following my heart and not getting anywhere (all I managed to do was work as a freelance writer and write short non-fiction ebooks for clients and not finish any of my own novels), I got seriously depressed.

The details of my depression aren’t necessary for this post so I’ll just say that it got really bad. There’s a year somewhere between 2018 to 2019 that I don’t remember much about because all I did was sleep all day. I would wake up to eat and binge YouTube for a while and then sleep again.

Throughout this journey, I’ve always been an overthinker and I had collected long digital journals trying to figure out what my problem was. Reading them back I could see that I had been going around in circles inside my head. So at the lowest point in my life, I decided to stop thinking about everything. I stopped writing journals and stopped figuring out life. In effect, I wasn’t on any path anymore. I gave up and just sat down on the side of the road.

After a rest, I focused only on what I could do and that was fitness for me and then a new reawakened passion for drawing. By quitting thinking, I was able to heal quite a lot but I still struggled with the old issue of how to get myself to do what I want to do. This time with the added unsurety of what I wanted to do. And that’s when I started seriously developing my philosophy.

The Philosopher’s Path

What I did was simply write down my thoughts and ideas and rationally try to understand the world and how it works without any emotional attachments. That led me to accepting nihilism; something I probably always felt at the back of my mind but tried to ignore.

Instead of saying, “Oh no, I’m headed towards nihilism, quick find something to believe in,” I said, “So this is what reason seems to be leading me towards, let’s just sit with it. So life is meaningless, so what? Kill myself right away or wait for a while?” And what I realized was that I don’t want to kill myself just because life is meaningless.

What I’ve found is that nihilism, rather than being a problem, is the solution to so many of our current problems. And philosophy is the way to think clearly about the world and understand it and figure out how to live.

The important thing I’ve understood is that philosophy won’t give you any secret power or formulas for success. It doesn’t promise you anything except understanding of the naked reality. It might even be too much for some people to bear but that’s all philosophy promises. This is not self-help.

No Wrong Path

And the thing about nihilism is that it means that there is no wrong way to live life. Whatever I’m doing right now, with all my frustrations and dissatisfaction, is objectively no better or worse than any other way of living life. Whether I live up to social expectations or not, whether I build status or not, whether I have kids or not, whether I earn wealth or success or fame or not, none of these things will make one particular life mean more than others. That lets me breathe easy as a starting point.

Let’s just sit with that for a while. Take a deep breath. It’s okay. There is nothing to do. There is nothing to optimize or solve or win. No medal ceremony after death. Whatever you’re doing, is fine.

Subjectively Better and Worse Paths

After that moment of zen, you then realize that subjectively, to you, different lives do matter more or less. If someone is okay with becoming a lazy glutton and sitting on the couch all day and eat good food till they die, that’s not a failed life, objectively speaking. But subjectively, I wouldn’t want that kind of life for myself. I would suffer in ways that I wouldn’t be able to accept.

That means that subjectively, there are better and worse lives for me; and therefore for everyone. Since people are different, there is no one best life for everyone. I doubt if there is one best life for an individual either. There are better lives and worse lives. There are tradeoffs, and the only one who can decide which tradeoffs are worth making, is the individual themselves. No one can tell them.

You Can Improve Your Path As You Go

There is still the doubt that I feel: am I choosing correctly? Is the path I’m choosing one of the best ones for me? That’s where nihilism comes in to the rescue again. Objectively it doesn’t matter and when it comes to your own subjective feeling, you don’t have to choose one and tie yourself to that path.

You can start anywhere and then iterate your life with feedback. You can start with a rationally derived life that you think is best for you and then remain open to feedback. If something is not working, use philosophy to understand why. There will be two options: either make a change, or accept that this is as good as that particular area of your life will get. Iteration or acceptance. Both can lead to improvement in life quality.

There is No Path; Just Experience

And in the end all that you can do is try to direct the experience you’re having in a way that is meaningful to you. You will end up having one or the other experience. Sometimes life will smack you in the face and you won’t have much agency. You might be thrown into a war you had nothing to do with, for example. Your experience might be full of suffering, or full of non-suffering. Neither will win you any medals.

You can try to curate your experience, guide it in ways you want it to go, while remaining lucid about how little power you have. You’re a node in a system, and moreover, you’re a fragile organic being with a tiny health bar. You can figure out the meaning of life and then an earthquake ends you. What’s the point? There is none.

And that’s what I’m doing: trying to curate my experience. It makes sense to philosophically figure out where I’m going wrong. What parts of my life are working and what are not working. And what tradeoffs are there to be made and then make a choice.

My Current Path

What’s working for me is taking care of my basic needs. Especially sleep and fitness but also diet. That has improved the quality of my life a lot.

What’s not working is getting caught up in distractions of videos and feeling like I don’t have control over my attention. I’ve quit all other social media a long time ago. I quit YouTube as well for a few months but it keeps clawing back into my life.

Another source of frustration is wanting to do so many different things and not really finishing any projects in any category and feeling like I’m not achieving anything and my pursuits are not fruitful.

I’m like a hunter who tracks one animal halfway and then gets distracted by something and then starts following another track. And never catches anything.

Watching YouTube also ties me into maya, the illusory human world, and makes me want to think about money and success and ambition again.

The current iteration of my path is to sleep well, eat well and get enough physical exertion and movement everyday in the morning. Try to be more conscious about the content I consume in the evening. Do more reading, listening to albums and playing games and less binging shows and YouTube videos.

The main part of the day is for value creation or beauty creation, but instead of having fixed time for each category or choosing only one thing to focus on, I’ll start a project in each category and then try to finish these projects and have something to show at the end. Less learning and more producing.

But more important than the routine is that I haven’t really explored my insight that attention is the key to everything. I want to deliberately control where my attention is being applied throughout the day. I know that you control attention by controlling your visual focus.

Part of this is to acknowledge that there is no perfect end goal to achieve. Some days are going to be lazy and some days I’ll be lost and sometimes I’ll even be sad. But knowing that in the end, none of it matters, actually makes it easier to get back up the next day and try again to have a good experience.

I guess I’m just trying to optimize the experience of each day and not worrying too much about the long term. The underlying principle I’m sort of assuming is that if you take care of your present moment, the long term will sort itself out. Let’s see if this turns out to be true or not. This is how philosophy should be tested anyway. Out there in the real world.

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Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash