Thread by @cryptoseneca

chasing leads to unhappiness but doing nothing leads to meaninglessness.

where is the middle ground? how does one “achieve” without feeling empty at the end?

my early 20s were all about chasing money, status and material things.

every “achievement” towards those things was a way to mask myself from seeing the treadmill i was on.

all leading to a pervasive feeling that i was never complete (money, dating, self, etc).

the big lie in achievements might be this:

regardless of achieving your intended outcome or not, you are never satisfied.

stoicism helped me overcome the chase but it also stifled the ambition.

while not advocating a passive life, it does not focus on an active one either.

by focusing on that which is within your control, you circumvent being let down by a chaotic reality that you do not control.

but then - is a life well lived if it was not lived at all? one should go out and conquer - how else can we find meaning if not by art? does the artist *have* to look back on his death bed and say “i should have”?

so i come around to the initial question and my answer so far:

doing for the sake of doing.

filling life with as many activities as possible where the outcome does not matter. you only do, to continue to do.

in this manner one can interact with a chaotic world while still being able to be complete in the now... because now is as good as it will ever be.

* i realize this is simply outcome detachment. i had to go through a lot to understand those simple words.
** i don’t believe true artists (think jesus, rock stars, elon, etc) can live this way. there is a reason most of them end up crazy or dead - they are martyrs for society.