Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Choosing a destination as a means of setting shorter term priorities is a bad idea. It makes it hard to discover your mistake until you're dead. Hash out what you want NOW—much rarer & harder than it sounds—and think about the long term as one of many ways of criticising that.

The way I'm thinking about these terms: > desire — what you think you want > destination — set of conditions that you think will satisfy your desires (many could be feasible) > path — the actions that you think will move you closer to your destination

I think you basically can't go wrong trying to understand your desires, as long as you also understand that they're not all necessarily stable & it's possible to be wrong about them. This is true of your destination & path, too, but there are additional risks there...

I think destination-focus is often preferable to path-focus because it (a) gets you closer to thinking about desires & (b) gives you a reference point, coordinates that you can notice yourself moving closer to or further from. Still, the failure mode you're noting is very real

Yeah I think one should basically seek to have fun/do what they want right now and destinations,paths,etc. should just be theories on how to act so you can have fun indefinitely. Or more and more fun as you go.

To illustrate the difference. Suppose you enjoy being creative about something. Then you should be doing it right now but also think about how to build a support system that will allow you to do it over time. That may mean pursuing certain roles or building certain relationships

OTOH you have corporate ladder climbing. It might superficially look very similar to that but really people are not doing what they want and are hoping that one day they will finally get to do what they want, be happy and there will be cake. And the cake if often a lie.