An Alternative Life

04 Feb 2024

It is weird how risk averse I am. If I am in a set of conditions that I don’t like, then those conditions didn’t arise overnight. They are a result of choices that I have made over decades. I could have chosen other things.

I hope it is not too late for an alternative life. It first occurred to me, when I realized that I had no plan for the future. Where do I want to be 5 years from today? I have no clue.

I get only one life. And I have squandered half of it. And it is such a waste. I mean there is a pervasive doomerism to it too. There is the nihilistic view - were I to be as successful as my friends, would life still not feel meaningless? What do I do? How do I turn back the clock.

The fact of the matter is when making a choice we don’t consider all available alternatives. We just look at the most popular two or three choices.

For an example, there are all kinds of careers and businesses, were you to decide on a career or to start a business - what would you do? Of course things will depend on your background and your experience but there are only a few things that you can think of. The market is vast but choice is constrained by knowledge.

This is weird to me, but I want a change from my job and I can only think of Engineering or MBA. Or maybe a content creator? If I were to make an app, it would be a productivity app. Is there all there is to the world. There is so much opportunity in the world, but we only know the most walked paths. Every seems to trod the well trodden paths.

There is more to life, there has to be more to life, but how do I get to it?

One thing is clear to me, I don’t know where I will be 5 years from now, but One thing is for sure, I will certainly not be productive.

As a child I wanted to be some sort of a mad scientist. But that dream met reality in Grad School and fizzled out. I don’t have any other ideas about life. I want to think and discuss cool ideas, but I don’t know how.

One thing that has stuck me is how isolated I have been in my life. I have no one to bounce ideas off of, except for my closest family which for the most part means my wife, mom, to some extent my father and perhaps my brother occassionally. That is all.

Today I am employed and I am not thankful for it. It feels like a chore. It feels like I deserved better. I could have been worse off too. At least I am gainfully employed. I am married. But I feel burntout by life. Days at office are difficult and stressful. The work is not difficult. I just don’t want to do it. I just while away time. I don’t know what to do, how to go about it. I just pass days.

This cannot last. I know. I should do something. I have to change. But I am burntout to my very soul. I don’t feel like doing anything. Everything feels difficult. All I want to do is watch YouTube and feel productive.

There has to be more to life. One has to do more. But I just dread going to work. I hate going to office. I don’t like it at all. There is so much work, that I don’t know how to do. I just postpone things and do them at the last moment. I am not doing anything. I am just passing time. If I just did all my tasks on time, everything would be so much better.