Searching for Purpose

I was sitting on a bench just enjoying the beautiful fall day. It was sunny and warm, or perhaps I was warm due to the semi-vigorous bike ride. Every now and then a cloud would briefly cover the sun or a gentle breeze would throw a slight chill in the air, a reminder that eventually the cold winter would come.   I was off work this week, and was soaking in as much nice weather as I could before the inevitable winter. My phone blinged and I saw that a blogger friend of mine sent me a message. He was wondering if I was ok because he noticed I have not posted anything on the blog for a few months. He wasn’t the first person to remark upon my lack of writing.

I assured him I was still alive and well, but that I have just had other priorities. It got me thinking though – why did I stop blogging? I mean I was writing pretty regularly, and it’s not like my life is all that busy these days. I  put the phone in my pocket and sat there for a few more minutes before getting back on the bike.

Could it be that I was just burned out? The guy that writes about burnout, burns out from writing? How meta is that? Maybe I was a little depressed, or bored, or whatever. The truth is life and humans are complicated, and I imagine I am a couple of standard deviations from normal with respect to this. At first I figured the reason I stopped writing is that my blogging stated to feel a little repetitive. I mean my message is very simple:

Organize your life around freedom and happiness by getting rid of all the alligators, being efficient with your money and optimizing your physical and mental health to become the best version of yourself.

How many ways can I say the same thing over and over again?

As I read through other blogs about these topics, it felt like that move Groundhogs Day, the one where the reporter wakes up every day and it’s the same day over and over and over again. Everyone was saying similar things, and arguing over semantics and little details that didn’t matter. I started to wonder if anything I wrote even mattered. My blog is just a few hundred thousand words in an endless, nearly infinite blogosphere, and there are many bloggers writing about the same things I do. Many of them are much better writers than me anyways. I’m not immune to imposter syndrome after all.

As I really dug into my state though, I realized that my lack of writing was a reflection of what was going on in my own life. Although I have many posts about the self-experimentation and tactics that have helped me become a happier person, I was not taking my own advice. My meditation and exercise practices have become nothing short of pathetic. I’ve let news creep into my life in insidious, happiness crushing ways. I have not optimized my diet, sleep or alcohol consumption in a way that leads to an optimal life. I have started to worry about things that I cannot control, or at least can only minimally influence, and I spend too much time drifting from the present moment, either worrying about things that haven’t yet happened or second guessing some of my past decisions. As my own life veered away from the things I teach on this blog, I felt as if I had less authority to write about these things.

That is my armchair psychoanalysis of myself anyways. Sounds pretty stupid right? After all, it is in the struggle where we learn the most, right?

A Nudge

Every now and then I will glance at the stats on my blog to see where traffic is coming from. Mostly it is from search engines, but in the last few weeks there were two sources that I want to bring attention to. The first is the ChooseFI podcast. It is a great show and for some reason they let me be a guest on the podcast last year. You can listen to me ramble here if you want. I was confused though, because that interview was a long time ago, and it didn’t make sense what it would drive so much traffic now. What was going on?

It turns out the traffic was coming from a new interview with Mr. and Mrs. WoW (Waffles on Wednesday) who gave a couple of my posts a shout out (thanks!). It reminded me of our conversations at FinCon last year where we laughed about the rather tangential way I helped them get into the financial independence blogging scene. I didn’t go to FinCon this year, and I realized that I missed seeing the WoWs and the many friends I made there last year.

The second one was not nearly the volume of traffic, only a handful of readers, but it stood out and I was curious. I clicked on the link and found an important example of why we should not be so dismissive of the impact that we have. The truth is that we never really know who we are going to inspire or in what way when we produce content and throw it out there for the world to see. Joy is a surgeon who wrote this post about her experiences with burnout and suicide during her surgery residency. I loved it. Go ahead and read it.

As I pondered these two seemingly unrelated events and the nudge on social media, I started looking at the stats of my blog and marveled at the fact that even though I haven’t done anything in months, there are hundreds of people every day who still stumble upon it and read my articles. I’m sure at least a few of these people are loyal readers just checking to see if I posted anything new. I felt a small amount of guilt for just stopping all of a sudden.

Getting back to the root of the issue though – freedom and happiness. My level of freedom has never been higher, although my happiness level is not at its peak. Now I don’t want to give you the wrong idea here – I’m still overall satisfied with my life. I can’t complain, but I feel like there is something missing. As I stated at the end of my interview last year on the ChooseFI podcast, freedom does not cause happiness. Freedom is correlated with happiness. I believe happiness is more likely to cause freedom, but this is not exactly right either. It is more complicated and there is a third element that is quite important.

Purpose

This is what has historically kept physicians going when they have been up for 30 hours or on call every other night for their whole careers. Saving lives and helping people was their purpose. Having purpose can make the intolerable tolerable. It can cause a sort of satisfaction that may not be exactly happiness, but is close enough. As I reflect upon my life, maybe that is what I’m searching for – purpose.  I’m not sure I have one right now.

Maybe that is part of the reason why I burned out from medicine in the first place. Medicine didn’t really seem much like a purpose after a while, but more like a responsibility, a job. Doctors have been slowly transforming from healers to “providers” – replaceable cogs designed to maximize revenue for massive health care corporations who are locked in deadly combat with each other to become bigger and take over other weaker health systems. I know this is cynical and a bit over the top, but medicine has changed in the 20 or so years I have been in it, and others I’ve talked with have echoed similar sentiments.

Statistically my life is more than half over. Maybe technology will turn me into a cyborg or my consciousness will be downloaded into a network of computers and I will live for hundreds or thousands of years, but I’m not counting on it. I’ve accomplished a lot in my life, and I’m proud of many of the things I’ve done, but at the same time feel like I’ve done very little. I don’t know how exactly to reconcile this paradox, but I think I need to figure this out to be at true peace with the universe. What is my purpose at this point in my life?

I’m not sure I have a good answer right now, but I think figuring it out starts with getting back to the basic principles. It starts with taking my own advice, creating better habits, starting from scratch. I’ll see what emerges from this new chapter.

Hopefully (for your sake) some interesting writing 🙂

Namaste.