All the way in

I went after something recently that checked every box. When it didn't happen, the feeling that surfaced wasn't disappointment. It was relief. And the relief unsettled me more than losing it ever could.

I sat with that for days, because it was more honest than anything my mind had been telling me. My body had already answered the question I was still circling. You didn't want this. You wanted it to want you. There's a difference, and it took the thing falling through for me to see it.

I've been having a version of this conversation with friends for months. One hates what he does and can't picture the math working any other way, so he stays. Another walked away from his field entirely and is learning something he's never done before, just because he wants to. ‘More money’ isn’t enough for him anymore. Same door, different hallways. One is still in front of it, one is already through.

The question underneath all three of us is simple to say and hard enough to sit with that most people don't. It surfaces in the gaps. A long weekend. A slow morning. The first quiet after a stretch of noise. What do I actually care about? Not, what am I good at? Not what the market pays for. What would I do if no one were keeping score?

"How do I make money?" is the easier question. Hard, but it has a shape. Inputs, levers, and a number at the end. You can walk straight at it, and you were built to. Then the other one arrives with no metric at all, and to someone who has optimized their whole life, a question with no scoreboard doesn't feel like freedom. It feels like a malfunction.

There's a reason we reach for the next thing instead of sitting in it. The scoreboard kept us safe. It gave the day a shape and told us we were okay before we had to ask.

Letting go of it doesn't feel like freedom, it feels like free-fall, so we fill the space.

Another venture, another client, another offer that makes just enough sense to say yes to. That's the quiet danger. Not that fine is bad, but that fine is the most comfortable place to disappear. And you can run a whole life on it without ever noticing the thing you actually wanted is still sitting there, unopened.

And the ground under all of it is moving. The skills that used to be the scoreboard are being handed to machines, and even the people who are winning have started to ask, quietly, what it was all for.

Here's where it comes through clearest for me. The one thing I do with no case to make for it is put my hands in the dirt. Saturday morning, laptop shut in the other room, kneeling in the garden, growing something with no audience and no return I could put on a slide. I'm not telling you the answer is gardening. The garden is just the one place the signal arrives with nothing attached, so I can finally hear what it actually sounds like.

But I've heard it just as loud in a room. A handful of sharp people around a hard problem, each bringing something the others don't have, building on each other so fast you lose track of who said what. You feel the level rise in real time, the best people you know making each other better, everyone climbing to keep pace, until the thing you make together is past anything you walked in able to do alone. Then a client goes quiet and tells you they didn't know it could be this good. That is not fine. That is fully alive, and it happened at a desk. The dirt didn't teach me the feeling. It reminded me of one I already know, and showed me how often I still trade it for something that merely makes sense.

Garden or boardroom, I want to be all the way in the thing, not half-here on autopilot while the part of me that's awake waits in the other room.

You have your own version of this. Your own room, your own dirt. The thing you lose track of time inside, the work that doesn't feel like spending yourself to do it. You don't need me to tell you what it is. You already know. The only real question is whether you're letting yourself near it, or filling the days with things that make just enough sense to say yes to.

And you don't get there by thinking harder. A friend told me recently, bluntly, that you don't find it sitting still. You find it by making things, building things, doing the work in front of you. You weed the garden. You ship the thing. The answer lives in the doing, not in studying it from a safe distance.

I can't tell you what I'll want in ten years. You don't get to run the counterfactual; you choose as the person you are right now, and mean it. My friend is still standing in the doorway, and I know exactly how easy it would be to spend the next decade beside him.

So I've stopped pretending the question isn't there. I'd rather be awake inside it than comfortable outside it. You can feel which one you're living.

I'm still finding the nerve to live fully like I mean it, without fear, but as always, it’s a work in progress.

Until next Sunday,

Eric

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