Apparently part of the quarter life crisis is an increased fear of death.
For the first time in my life my metabolism has observably slowed down, my injuries don’t heal that quickly if at all, and the idea that I will be gone some day is really hitting me.
And if that’s the case, should I be living life any differently?
Life’s Purpose?
So then before I die, what should I live it for?
Maybe this is why so many people feel so strongly about having children. I mean it makes sense. Children are an extremely strong anchor for purpose. Even not thinking about it evolutionarily, raising and educating children must feel amazing in that it’s something to pour yourself into and have the joy of tangibly experiencing your effort.
Perhaps that’s too reductive, but as someone without any children it’s impossible to truly crest into the emotional territory of understanding.
So should that be what I strive for?
It could be that I’m selfish but I’m scared to stop living my life for myself for now. Especially as I more seriously entertain the startup lifestyle.
Just Commit
I do have some idea of what my “life’s mission” could be at this moment - right now it’s making health and healthcare available and financially accessible.
Of course, if you’re any way familiar with the healthcare landscape in the US you would know that this is a huge undertaking. So that’s been leading me to the question: until there’s any tangible evidence that this is even remotely possible, how do I actually know this is what I want?
I feel like up until now, when there’s people telling me what the “mission” is (and therefore telling me how to achieve) it, it’s been relatively easy to “flex” my thinking and quite easily align with their proposition.
But now I’m the sole person making the call that both: this is what I want to do with my life, and this is how I’m going to achieve it.
So far, this has been incredibly difficult.
Previous startup ideas have fizzled out the moment I ran into difficulties because it was so easy to talk myself out of effort when the end goal didn’t fundamentally appeal to my “purpose”.
This is something that the accelerator program EF talked about repeatedly during the beginning portions of their programming. Startup idea exploration is almost an exercise in finding your life’s purpose, at least for the next decade, as it’s extremely rough to commit wholly to something that you don’t 1000% believe in.
I kept thinking, progressively, that every idea that we came up with throughout the EF program could be the one.
But how could I even tell? And committing, specifically if taking VC money, means that you’re really gonna be all in for at least a little while. VCs obviously don’t like it if they give you money for a vision and you don’t follow through on it.
Life Outside of Work
The other thing is I also don’t want to just revolve my life around building a startup or running a company, or just otherwise being successful in commercial endeavors.
One thing I am certain about is that I want to experience life, in all kinds of facets. I guess having children is actually one of those facets, but I will leave that for later. Growing up in multiple cultures has made me privy to the fact that the Western, and also American, way of viewing the world and inhabiting it is only one way to do so. The planet is vast humans have found so many creative ways to call it their home and, through that process, concocted varying approaches and cultures.
A truism in my mind is that I want to experience things for myself, and then decide for myself if that’s the type of thing I want to keep experiencing or not. Instead of other people telling me what my opinion should be.
For example, up until moving to SF I had really never lived in a “Tier 1” city in North America before. Chicago is sorta there but I had never lived in Chicago for an extended period of time. Of course everyone has heard discourse around these cities, the most prominent ones being the hustle, noise, stress, and of course drug and homelessness epidemics. However the last thing I wanted to do was to never live in a city and “settle” (so to speak) for what is “known” to be comfortable in the suburbs. I desperately wanted to live it and know it for myself by actually properly living in a city such as SF.
And turns out, it’s actually pretty fucking nice. Being able to get to most places by foot, bike, or public transit has made spontaneity extremely easy. I don’t mald at stop-and-go traffic anymore. Though obviously there’s the downsides too. The important thing to me though is that now I get to make the call based off of my own experience.
What Do?
So now lies a conflict.
On the one hand there’s the hunkering down and starting a startup, and on the other hand there is experiencing the world.
It has all been culminating in my head as a strong sense of survival. In order to do these things, I need to live a long and healthy life. I’m not sure which of these 2 things I want to tackle first (it’s probably the startup), but in either ordering, length of time is extremely important.
Further reinforcing this is the fact that I’ve been doing a lot of customer development with health-conscious people. Some of whom have dedicated huge portions of their lives to staying healthy and living long. So a lot of our conversations will wander in fear of death territory. Very topical, but doesn’t help my own mental state lol.
Beyond now KNOWING that I want to desperately stay alive to play my life out, my exact actions and what I DO on a day-to-day basis has become less clear than ever.
Both starting a startup and experiencing the world are things that are up to my own prerogative. There isn’t a manager or boss who’s gonna assign a ticket for this (sigh).
And this murkiness have been percolating into my actions in the form of doubt. Everything that’s not working on the startup is wasting my time. But also should I really be putting off “life” for doing a startup? Where the risk and uncertainty is basically maxed out relative to almost anything else I could be doing?
I think(?) my decision now is to all-in, full commit on startups.
I don’t, and no one else will either, know if this decision will pan out the way that I think it will.
But I’m scared of not finding out.
And I’m scared of slipping away before I do.