I’ve sat here looking at a blank page for longer than I care to admit. These blog posts are largely just streams of consciousness, where there’s a general topic, event, or theme I want to talk about but I have no established or effective game plan. I’ll write them in one sitting, take the most cursory of glances to check for spelling or grammatical errors, post it, and link to it without much advertisement.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d use for a title. Potential candidates feel, in a vacuum, largely negative or attention grabbing so I don’t really want the contents of the post to be unfairly assessed before someone reads it. So, if you’re going to read this I’d implore you to look at the whole message objectively. Also I’d assure you to the extent possible that I’m okay.

A couple of nights ago I reached something of a checkmate scenario with myself. Emotional highs and lows are commonplace and something I certainly struggle with but that night I was pretty much at the bottom of the spectrum. Perhaps it’s been because of I’ve started meditating and trying to visualize goals that will make me happy, but with this emotional valley I also had a startling level of clarity.

I thought on what it would be like to accomplish the goals I have set out for myself. The sense of accomplishment of it all. How reassuring and vindicating it’d feel to put countless hours into an endeavor. To persist through lapses of motivation and interest. To sacrifice immediate gratification to plod away at something for a larger payoff down the road. I sat with that feeling, and thought on some of the accomplishments I’ve already pulled off and how I feel about them.

I don’t think accomplishing any of these theorized goals, no matter how lofty or ambitious, will actually make me happy. In fact, it’s with a pretty sharp measure of confidence that I’d say I would just end up back at the emotionally hollow place I was right then. Only then I’d also be met with the realization that even for all the effort I’ve put in I didn’t effectively get anywhere. So what was the point?

Believe me. My attempts at refuting this notion were plenty. I reasoned with myself, trying everything from baseless positive self-talk to every cognitive technique I could think of. It all just lead me back to the same place. Every turn, every mental path. Just back at a central point of futility and hopelessness.

With the full strength of my mental faculty and ability to reason coming to a pretty sound conclusion, I did the only thing I could do.

I gave up.

Part of me died emotionally as I sat there on my couch. A friend just so happened to message me, and I’m sure they thought something was off with how I was responding. Albert gets pretty down on himself sometimes, sure, but this is different. There must really be something up. I’m certain that’s what they thought. I loathed the idea that I’ve made someone I care about worry me, especially in an instance where I don’t feel much value in myself.

Ever since I turned 30, I’ve been on this journey to grow as a person. I’ve chronicled a lot of those twists and turns here in this blog. People have come and gone in my life, much like the seasons and my varying frames of mind and realizations. There was an almost childish sense of naivety to the whole idea that I would, someday, become the person I wanted to and hoped I could be. That I would do the things I had hoped I was capable of doing.

Thinking back then, I would have never thought that I’d come to a conclusion that while the results of my efforts leave me feeling confident that I could do those things with enough effort I wouldn’t particularly care to.

Climbing into bed felt weird. What was the point of waking up the next day? I thought about it for a while, and could hardly find an answer. It’s a sad irony that I’ve gathered years of experience going through life’s motions while feeling disconnected emotionally. I was able to fall back on a lot of that mindset. Home, sweet home. Abject defeat really is like riding a bike. Who knew.

The next day felt average enough. Nothing really stood out. I tried to find things to be grateful for to gather a sense of appreciation for life. And there are a lot of things I am truly grateful for. My family. My friends. The accomplishments I’ve managed. My being ‘me’, and being able to use what I have to do the things I have done is certainly still cool to me. Still, by most accounts, I have a great life. Things could certainly be worse, and I’m thankful that they’re not.

But what’s next? That’s the question that came to mind.

Spending the rest of my life like this didn’t sound particularly fun. I wouldn’t say this whole emotional trek took me to a place of feeling suicidal. At most, I just concluded I saw no point to living. Not necessarily that I wanted to die. Reading that back as I type it now sounds grim-dark as Hell, but again I assure you that I’m looking at all of this objectively. Dispassionately, even. That could be argued to be a problem in and of itself, but even that’s not being legitimately suicidal. I would talk to someone if I was.

Mulling over this question gave me an odd sense of relief, surprisingly. For years now I’ve put so much pressure on myself to do and accomplish these things. To be who I want to be. While I haven’t hit all of the checkboxes, I’ve at least put down the foundation. Every setback or time I feel I’d gotten lazy brought a measure of pressure and shame that it was sometimes hard to act and push forward.

I started to ask myself what were some of the times I felt genuinely, truly happy. Maybe that could serve as a form of resurrection; a return to the path I had set myself on. So when have I felt that way? The instances are few and far between, if I’m being honest.

I’m happy when I see my folks and when they tell me they’re proud of me. It makes me feel like I haven’t let them down and that the effort spent raising me wasn’t wasted. I’m happy when someone that loves me smile at me without reservation and I see the hope, love, trust, and happiness they share with me glimmer in their eyes. It gives me such a warm feeling and a sense of duty and responsibility to never let that person down. Not exactly batting .1000 there, but I suppose that’s another blog post. Still, add it to the list.

The times someone messages me, however close we are or aren’t, to say they read my blog post and something resonated with them. Or even that it helped them in some way. That’s always mind blowing to me. When someone hangs out in my stream and says they appreciate the atmosphere and the community that’s formed there. Things like that.

Personal growth accomplishments, like when I cast and push aside negative self-talk to be an honest representation of me fulfilling a role I enjoy. I like giving context to the personal struggles I endure by saying even though I feel this way I can still muster up the energy and courage to put myself out there in such a way.

In thinking on ways I could potentially replicate this, a light bulb, dusty and unused as it’s ever been, flickered and sputtered before finally it shone bright.

I’ve been a largely selfish person for most of my life. It’s not a great quality, but it’s worth being honest with myself.

My goals, when I thought about them, have all been about me. What I accomplish. How it makes me feel. What it says about me. What it proves to myself. What I get out of it. I think of all the cool things I’ve done and have bought and how the happiness that all grants is fleeting at best and often feels hollow.

That’s the core root on why I gave up. None of it made me happy. Not really. Not in any tangible, consistent way. Not even content. Bear in mind I don’t mean riding off into the sunset, grinning ear to ear, shaking jazz hands happy. I mean just a basic sense of fulfillment and being content. Being pleased with myself and my life. That’s the  feeling that’s hard to come by.

And the folly of my outset hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve spent so much time and energy working to better someone I don’t really love or care about. Again, odd irony to say that my problem all along has been that it’s been to benefit myself when I don’t much like myself. But, it’s true.

I thought about the things that made me feel happy, and none of them really had anything to do with me. They’re rooted in how others made me feel. It wasn’t that I made a certain amount of money, or that I got to do a certain thing.

Mining more from this thread of logic brought me to realize something I’ve actually been thinking about for a while but haven’t been able to really find. I’ve been wanting to write a mission statement of sorts for myself. Something to guide my actions in service towards something. I haven’t been able to find something worth working toward in my life enough that I’d want it to guide my thoughts and actions that extensively.

But I thought about how pursuing goals for my own benefit hit a certain dead end, and what things did make me happy. It’s a bittersweet idea, but I think I’ve decided that my life’s purpose is to work towards becoming the kind of person I want others to aspire to be so the world becomes a better place.

The best way I can possibly articulate this concept is that one of my long term goals is to write a book. One that is the result of my time on this journal of personal developments. My thoughts. My conclusions. I genuinely set this goal with the intent to help others, but a lot of the push behind it was to prove to myself that I actually could sit down and write a full book.

This life purpose changes this goal from wanting to write a book to help others to writing a book so that I can help others. Perhaps that’s splitting hairs to some, but it’s a pretty stark and profound difference to me.

I write out all of this to say I’ve come to a somewhat disheartening conclusion that I just don’t feel I’m a person hardwired for the kind of happiness I’ve sought the past few years. And while the proverbial jury is out on whether or not that means I’m not wired happiness at all, I can use this conclusion to be selfless where I’ve been selfish.

I’m not happy, but maybe I can make someone else’s life better. Maybe I can lift up family and friends. Maybe I can help someone through a tough time. I can hopefully inspire someone to go after a goal of theirs.

If I can hit milestones with casting, or with web development, or with just carving out a certain kind of life it may make someone think that if I can do it then maybe they can do. If I positively impact even just one person in that capacity, and their life ends up being a fraction better than it would have otherwise then at the very least some good came out of my time on this planet.

A value I try to upkeep is to leave things like I found them or better. If I can bring positivity to people maybe it helps their day, which in turn helps their next interaction with a loved one or with how they look at their goals. It makes someone’s day, their world, a little brighter. And they maybe pass that on to someone else.

Let’s say a cashier is having a bad day and my kindness to them helps them get through their shift and maybe that encourages them to be nicer to the next person. And that carries on. It goes viral. And the butterfly effect leads to someone’s marriage sticking together because a couple aren’t taking their bad days out on each other and because of that they have a kid that ends up changing the world.

If I’m going to have lofty ambitions, I’d rather they were like that.

Elon Musk said, to paraphrase, that he started SpaceX because he hopes that one day humans are able to explore deeper into space, past our solar system. He said he started Tesla because he wanted to make energy efficient transportation affordable to benefit the world. The guy puts an insane amount of time and effort into these endeavors, employing genius and ingenuity to ultimately help people. I’m sure being able to print money is cool too, but that’s not why he does any of that stuff.

I’ve never actively set a goal to make my life or my pursuits about others or the greater good. Even this blog was meant to be therapy for me, and people benefiting from it ended up being an unexpected side effect. I think there’s a very real correlation to this selfish way of thinking and my general emotional detachment from people. And possibly even my own inability to be happy.

I guess I wrote all of this to say I learned more about the idea that it’s better to give than to receive, and wanting to give can be a powerful motivator and I’m hoping that it becomes one for me.

If the world is ever going to be what it could and arguably should be people have to change. I don’t have the gumption or the ego to say I’m going to change the world, but it’d be cool to think that this shift in mindset helps someone out that ultimately does. Or at least makes it better than it was like I found it.