One of my childhood friends recently passed away. We've been close since I was four years old. This was a shock, and it's making me audit my life.

When I notice myself drifting, I anxiously obsess about it.

• I spend several hours writing a new life plan while consuming inspirational hustle-culture material. I analyze until I emotionally feel like the plan is going to fulfill me. This calms me down and makes me feel empowered until the next time I feel directionless or discouraged (in about six months to a year).

  • I've run this circular track of goal-setting over and over, always expecting to find lasting fulfillment or calm at the finish line. I tell myself: after this next achievement, I'll never have to work or be stressed again!

    • Every loop, I'm like a junkie who needs stronger and stronger hits of self-help material to calm his anxiety, and to give him hope that achieving this goal will be the one which gives lasting contentment (regret minimization, thinking in systems rather than goals, building and breaking habits, spiritual practices, etc).

    • I'm just like the cargo cults described by Richard Feyman: my approach clearly isn't working, but my only solution is to do more of my non-working approach — with some tweaks or with an increase in intensity.

  • My goal-setting behavior, and my anxiety about having a lack of life direction, might be due to the interplay between my personality and my society.

    • I alternate between feeling incredibly anxious and feeling like a master of the universe. This is probably because I've externalized my barometer of self-worth, and my self-esteem is based on how other people feel about me.

    • I value myself based on social approval, and thus pay most attention to what my larger society (the largest group of people in my life) tells me is "good."

    • Therefore, I've deeply and unconsciously bought into the capitalistic treadmill of American society. I solely measure my worth by prestige, productivity, and economic value, all of which are inherently brittle and have ever-rising standards.

I seem to be experiencing personal bitterness, or perhaps self-hatred.

• I'm at the point where I don't do anything for its own sake — and thus experience little joy. All work, no play. I also don't allow myself to have any "useless" hobbies. I've aimed to fully productize myself, optimize every moment, to effectively become an uninspired machine.

• I tell myself that I don't deserve to have friends or to do fun things. Those can come later — but only once I've made it. I only relax or unwind when it feels like my body and mind are rebelling or breaking down, when I have no other choice.

• There's a lot of bitterness towards myself for how hard I've driven myself, and how much I demand of myself. Part of me might secretly want me to fail. Part of me knows that my current attitude and approach are not the path to my happiness or fulfillment; rather, it's an elaborate self-punishment mechanism:

  • driving myself super hard to achieve a goal with impossible standards

  • self-sabotaging along the way

  • failing

  • punishing myself

So then I wonder: how do I break out of this pattern, and what do I actually want out of life?

• I've asked myself this question several times over the years. And my knee-jerk reaction always seems to be: "get rich" or "be powerful" or "have a big positive impact on the world."

• I think there's a problem with the way the question is worded. It implies getting something out of life, which further implies having to work towards a future payoff. It also focuses on wanting things, which naturally makes me think mimetically and gravitates towards the things which other people want.

• A better question is: how do I want to live life? It's necessarily tailored to me, it's focused on my direct controllable behavior, and it gives a steady drip of immediate payoffs. At every moment of living, I'm succeeding. I'm living in a state of success.

  • I suppose this is walking the path of virtue and the stoics. For me, the definition of virtue is to realize that the only thing within my control is my attitude.

  • But I balk at this idea because I think it might lead to downward spirals, where I feel like my attitude is bad, and thus feel bad, which makes my attitude worse.

  • Ah, but I'm not being precise with my definition of attitude here. Attitude is a separate entity from my emotions or feelings. I could be horrendously depressed with a great attitude.

  • Attitude is the bearing, the approach, the posture I have towards life. I could be tremendously emotionally volatile, but if my attitude is relentless, unstoppable, and resourceful, I can figure out how to make the most of the moment (taking into consideration all conditions such as my current emotional state).

• What about the other questions? Out of "who", "where", "what", "when", "why", and "how", we've covered "what" and "how".

  • "Who do I want to be in life" seems to have an uncomfortable bent towards mimesis.

  • "Where do I want to be in life" seems to focus on external payoffs.

  • "By when do I want my life to look like X" is the same as above.

  • "Why do I want that out of life" is kind of the exercise I'm currently doing.

So now I've settled on "how do I want to live my life?" And the answer is "with virtue, where virtue means embodying the fact that my attitude is the only thing controllable, and worth controlling."

• It's okay to feel horrible, bitter, or self-destructive. Let's just approach the situation with a great attitude, one even greater than what you believe you can currently muster.

• A great attitude is ungraspable. Its manifestation is wildly different in every situation.

Let's backtrack and look at whether this seems like it'll reasonably address everything I described above (keeping in mind that sometimes the greatest discoveries or innovations happened by accident, or seemed to be unreasonable at the time):

• It moves my valuation mechanism to be entirely internal: what's my attitude? How can I make my attitude better?

• It gets rid of goal-setting, and replaces it with: as long as I'm heading in the right direction, I'm succeeding

• It breaks me out of the cycle of living in constant failure, and rather rewards me in the current moment, which I hope will give me a better relationship with myself

In terms of habitual implementation, it becomes constantly checking in with myself: "what's my attitude?"