Enough

“What if I actually have already achieved everything I’m going to achieve in my life,” Dan Mall asks. “What does it feel like to live like someone where everything new is a bonus, not a desire and certainly not a need?”

At fifty-one, I have most likely passed the mid-point of my life. Given the older generation within my family have passed away in their 80s and 90s, I likely have three to four decades ahead of me. That’s still a lot of time.

And yet I’ve already reached a point where every day feels like a bonus—every day is gravy on top of what has felt like a very successful first half (or two-thirds).

The wall

For the longest time, I felt like web development was my life. Not only was it my life, it was part of my identity. As such, I thought I’d never stop.

Instead, I hit a wall—mostly from depression, possibly some trauma, but also a heaping pile of burnout as well. Professionally, it felt like I was “solving” the same problems over and over again. As a developer, I would come into a new organization and be working on feeds, sidebars, buttons, list views, and detail views, over and over again. Take a look at any site or tool and none of them are breaking any new ground from an interface perspective. Nor should they. People don’t want to learn cryptic interfaces. They want predictable.

As a result, I started stepping back. I stopped speaking at conferences. I stopped writing about technical topics. I stopped marketing myself.

This might sound depressing but as it turns out, it has been both humbling and liberating. It has meant examining my life and approaching it from a position of gratitude.

Well lived

To look back over my professional career, I am grateful for the opportunities I was given and the success I have achieved. I’ve written books. I’ve spoken at conferences around the world. I’ve helped build products that have reached hundreds of millions of people. Yes, there are plenty of people out there that have achieved more but I have no desire to compare myself to them.

Even in my personal life, I’ve achieved the goals I set out for myself. I’ve checked off all the things on my bucket list. The house, the car, the travel, the restaurants.

It’s been surreal to review my life and marvel at all of the experiences I’ve had the opportunity to participate in. Those opportunities don’t happen in a vacuum, of course, and I’m grateful for all the people who have helped along the way. A lot of those opportunities have felt like being in the right place at the right time—sheer luck. When I graduated high school in 1993, the World Wide Web was only just starting out. While I dabbled in HTML, I never considered it a career option, just as I had never considered Usenet or IRC as a career option. They were simply mediums on which to discuss academic or hobby interests. It wasn’t until 1998 when I realized that there was a possible career here and I started to pursue it aggressively. I could’ve easily had a career as an accountant instead. But as they say, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

What comes next

“I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships,” Arthur C. Brooks writes in his essay about professional decline.

While Brooks says this as an approach to “clearly see my refined self in its best form,” that feels a bit too self-aggrandizing—like there is some ideal self that we need to continue pursuing in our later years, as if we’re not already good enough.

I do like the idea of it as a form of simplifying my life, though. After all, if I die tomorrow, do I want my kids to have to sort through all of the crap I’ve accumulated? Do I want them to be burdened with cleaning up my things and obligations?

What comes next for me is, I guess, not a refinement of the self but a refinement of learning of the self, to know myself better.

Brooks goes on to say that he’ll be focusing on serving others and nurturing deeper relationships.

“Throughout this essay, I have focused on the effect that the waning of my work prowess will have on my happiness. But an abundance of research strongly suggests that happiness—not just in later years but across the life span—is tied directly to the health and plentifulness of one’s relationships. Pushing work out of its position of preeminence—sooner rather than later—to make space for deeper relationships can provide a bulwark against the angst of professional decline.”

(He seems to contradict himself by saying he’ll get rid of relationships only to say happiness is tied to the plentifulness of relationships. But I digress.)

This is the headspace I’ve been in these days. How can I improve the relationships I have? How do I support them? I don’t mean that in a “do whatever other people want” kind of way. I mean it in a “how can I support others, in a way that doesn’t compromise myself” kind of way. I don’t want to just be an ATM for my kids or just a handyman for my mom. I want fulfilling relationships with them.

Whether it be my kids, my mom, my friends, or my partner, I want healthy relationships. My time in therapy these days has been spent learning how to approach those relationships with more trust and openness.

But that can be done regardless of whatever my professional direction may take. It shouldn’t be a full time job to foster relationships and on the flip side, work shouldn’t inhibit relationships, either. That’s not an either/or proposition.

Satisfied

If I have already achieved everything I’m going to achieve in my life, I am satisfied.

That doesn’t mean I’ll sit in a recliner, waiting for the hand of death to carry me across the threshold. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be something else that invigorates me in the next 10, 20, or 50 years.

So I lost some wind in the professional sails. Do I need a new headwind? Do I turn the boat towards exciting new waters, or enjoy floating along in a still and relaxing harbour? Both have their appeal.

Either way, I have enough. Whatever comes next will be met with gratitude and delight, even if nothing comes next.