This post is about the kind of life I want to live.
People die.
Opinions differ about nearly everything, but I believe everyone agrees on that one sentence. And it isn’t that we live peacefully and then fall asleep at some appointed hour. We get born more or less by accident, we worry, we suffer, and then luck fails and disease or an accident ends it. That is what life looks like to me.
I’m no exception, obviously. So as long as I’m alive I’d like to have fun and dodge as much of what I don’t want to do as I can. That’s why I try to secure as much freedom as possible. Freedom, the way I define it, is material comfort plus psychological independence.
Middle school and high school were not free. I assumed adulthood would be different. To my surprise, working life wasn’t free either, and it came with plenty of absurdity. Right around the time I was accepting that this is simply how the world works, I left for army boot camp.
Nonsan boot camp and coffee
I went to the army training center in Nonsan. In the mornings I wanted coffee so badly I could hardly stand it, and I couldn’t have any.
Nonsan training center
I seriously considered slipping a drill instructor ten thousand won to bring me a cup. But once I got out and finally drank coffee, it wasn’t that good. It wasn’t the taste I’d been craving in the army. That’s because the thing I was thirsty for wasn’t coffee, it was freedom. Being unable to do something I was capable of and wanted to do has been the single biggest pain in my life. That’s where I found the first requirement of freedom: material comfort, and economic and physical freedom.
The reason I studied hard in school was the same. I’d been told that a good university widens your options in life. Once I got there, that seemed true enough. But having a lot of options didn’t necessarily mean freedom, let alone happiness. AliExpress and Temu will sell me a countless number of things, and that doesn’t make me particularly happy either.
More options doesn’t seem to produce better choices, or more happiness after choosing. I felt that during the year and a half I spent shut in my room teaching myself to code after majoring in history. I watched friends settle into a track through law school or the civil service exam or some other route, and I argued with myself, compared myself to them, blamed myself, and finally accepted that every life runs on its own tempo.
https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=50439
That’s how I came to feel that convictions that don’t wobble are the other requirement for happiness.
Once I’ve already decided the direction of my own life, the choices other people make don’t have to determine my happiness. It took me a long while to learn that. I also learned that unhappiness comes less from a shortage of material wealth than from relative poverty, from the mental war of comparison and envy.
So: I really hate feeling boxed in, and I try to avoid anything that overrides my own will. I don’t want other people shaking me, and I don’t want to shake myself. Which is why I’m working on material comfort and psychological independence.
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How to avoid what you don’t want to do
While thinking about how to live and still avoid what I don’t want to do, I decided I should minimize squeezes. I learned about the “squeeze” from two books I love, “The Black Swan” and “Antifragile”. Like a short squeeze, a squeeze is a situation where some constraint leaves you no choice but to eat the loss. Take someone too busy to get regular dental checkups: eventually a tooth rots badly enough that they need an implant, which costs far more than the checkups ever would have. That kind of grin-and-bear-it situation is a squeeze.
That hurts.
I think squeezes can be avoided, and that failing to avoid them is what makes a life miserable. The most unpleasant experiences in life usually come from being forced into a choice you didn’t want. Something that lands on you by chance, like a natural disaster, is an accident. Something you brought on yourself through an unwise choice is a tragedy, and the two are not the same. Unlike an accident, a tragedy leaves you regretting and blaming yourself. That regret and self-blame is often more painful than whatever actually happened. Tragedy hurts far more.
So I want to avoid regret. Poker makes a good example. I love poker (hold’em). It’s a game where luck and skill, signal and noise, play together. It shows me the result of my choices in plain numbers and coldly bills me for whatever my emotions got their hands on. A feedback loop of about two minutes tells me where my emotional control and my decision-making actually stand. Poker is a mirror. It shows me as I am.
For all that build-up, I’m not good at poker. So when I play all night and walk home with empty pockets, a little of the thrill lingers and a lot of the bitterness does. The hands I lost to bad luck sting for a moment and then they’re gone. The hands I lost because I decided badly stay with me. How much I won, the result, doesn’t stick in memory. Regret and satisfaction both come down to how I made the decision, not how it turned out.
Life works the same way. I liked math, and I never expected to major in the humanities, then work as a developer, then end up posting on Brunch. There were probably better options available. But I made each choice with everything I had at the time, and I’m satisfied with that. If life has a right answer, I suspect it isn’t any particular shape of a life, but the decision to be satisfied with the life you decided on.
Whether I start a company or do something else, unexpected things will happen. That’s how life goes. I’ll respond as they come, and whatever the outcome, if the response was good I think it’ll have been a satisfying life. If I start a company and it fails because the luck went against me, I might end up in financial trouble, but I don’t think I’d regret it. If it fails because I made a stupid decision I could have avoided, I think I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
So that’s what I’m after: living without regret. Make the best decisions I can, and fill the life I’ve been given with things that are fun and mean something. This has all been abstract, so in the next post I’ll get concrete about how I plan to live.
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Books I chewed on for a long time
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The Black Swan, Antifragile (by Nassim Taleb)
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