Beautiful piece. I feel this very deeply these days. Loved ones are all that matter in life (including ones no longer in my life).
The ideas here remind me a bit of the book "Man's Search for Meaning."
I’m currently unemployed and I am lucky to have a generous runway, but that runway will run out eventually.
The idea that nothing matters outside of family, friends, etc is tempting but I have made sacrifices in relationships with others and myself to be a more employable candidate.
For example I’m taking LLM classes on Sunday mornings which precludes me from interacting with loved ones. I can try to schedule things around that-but sometimes that isn’t possible.
I’m also working on other things, my health, my fitness, my spiritually.
Finding balance has been hard. I’m in a good spot now, but I do find myself wondering if my ratios of time invested are correct given the fact that I also agree that loved ones are all that matter in life.
"Today is your last day." "Meh, whatevs, going home to my family."
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dy...
(20+ years in tech, have been laid off twice, fired once, aware none of it really matters, we're all dead eventually, a blip in the cosmic timeline)
It won’t matter, so get drunk with your friends and stack some rocks.
Good to take a balanced approach, but my thoughts too a lot of the time. I am most likely going to go to Patagonia in the next few weeks/months, a dream of mine, and then go home and see grandparents while they are still around.
The links are wonderful, thank you.
I appreciated the part about caregiver burnout:
"They are the shadow soldiers in the battle, where all the attention and support goes to the patient."
My wife asked me what was the plan. I told her nothing is changing, we went to our 14th city, I interviewed for three companies remotely and had two offers in three weeks. I accepted one and flew from there to meet my cousin in NYC for the US Tennis Open and met my wife in Chicago where my new employee shipped my computer.
I flew back home to end our year long trip, had Amazon ship the box to me to send my work computer back to them.
One monkey don’t stop no show.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302
This has been my mindset since leaving my second job in 2008. I’m now on my 9th.
If anything the detachment is powerful for those of us that have been raised to be people pleasers and expect loyalty to be repaid in kind.
It's much easier to realize you're a cog, it's not personal, and like a lot of things in life the pretense and fear of failure is often a huge upfront limiter.