Annum Review Celebration

Amidst a flurry of no doubt similar posts, I want to spend some time writing and thinking about my year in review.

To paraphrase Petronius from the classic historical novel Quo Vadis: “Ignorance and Wisdom are ultimately the same”. The point being, like the IQ basic distribution chart, it’s often best to do the most obvious thing.

So I’ll review and think about my year. As I’m sure you are in one way or another as well.

However, I’m going to take on this practice with a bit of a twist. I want to simply celebrate all that I have accomplished this year.

As I mature (I hope) it a reasonably functional (the intent being *highly* functional, but this not always being the case) young adult, I have become able to hit my yearly goals fairly frequently.

This is such a cool and enjoyable phenomenon that I’m still getting used to it. It is, in a very real sense, manifestation.

It’s funny how much woo-woo confusion and bullshit that word connotes due to the mainstream culture, but that’s a topic for another time.

My point is; in beginning to fully grasp my powers to achieve my goals I’m also truly beginning to fathom the human capacity for generativity.

This means refining my ability to pick proper goals, appreciate when I do accomplish the goals, and expand in my enjoyment of the entire process.

So, that last bit, is exactly what I want to do with this post. Expand in my capacity to enjoy the process of goal achievement, or manifestation. And I hope to inspire you to do the same.

I want to do this for two reasons.

One: it seems to be sheerly pragmatically beneficial in increasing this capacity for goal-achievement.

Two: it seems to be simply a net-good.

There have been many, many times in my life where I have been so focused on achieving the ~outcome~ of the goal that I forgot and/or didn’t know how to really savor and enjoy the completion of it.

This is one of the major reasons for setting oneself goals in the first place. To enjoy the reality of what once was merely a desired potential outcome far off in the future.

To this end, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of becoming ‘great’ since I was 18. I’ve read literally hundreds of books (and counting) on how to do that.

From the new-age BS laden self-improvement stuff, to biographies of great people, to psychology, philosophy, etc.

You name it, I’ve probably read it or at least heard of it. (Or not, in which case I’ll learn about something else, which is awesome too.) And I’ve come to realize, that being able to really savor the completion of a goal is fundamental to better goal-setting and accomplishment in the first place.

If we dehumanize ourselves into become goal-achieving machines (which we often do; personally, culturally and through our economic systems) then we denude our own personal capacities to actually achieve the goals we *truly* want and need.

It goes like this; our minds and bodies are goal-seeking machines, programmed with innate desires for our natural thriving.

However, we are inundated as a society with all manner of parasitic, erroneous, unnecessary demands and necessities in our hyper-modern world. We all have flaws and insecurities. We all are ignorant to more or less degrees, of our true, best nature.

So we take on goals and activities that don’t truly benefit us for all these reasons.

When this happens we instrumentalize ourselves.

Sometimes this is good. Like paying your taxes. It is not inherently joyful (for most people) to pay their taxes but most-things being equal, it is a good thing.

The problem occurs when we instrumentalize too much of our lives into meaningless goal accomplishment.

We may have many things or accomplishments in the external world in our lives, but if these accomplishments and/or attainments of such goals don’t bring us an expanding sense of joy, love, peace, inner wellbeing, etc. then we are actually misaligned with what truly makes us happy.

When this misalignment happens, which it often does, we find internal suffering that manifests itself in all manner of addictions, relational troubles, health problems and the like. Unhappiness and ‘dis-ease’ are a great source of many ills we witness bubbling up in society.

And so, the antidote to this problem is (in short) to truly savor the goals you accomplish. And, as the cliché goes, the journey along the way.

If you cannot do this or find it overly effortful to do so, you may want to reevaluate your goals.

I strive (and hope to be) an empiricist in this domain (as well as the rest of life). So, in my experience, truly taking the time to savor and fathom one’s own capacity for accomplishment in life is a major antecedent for more of the same. Realizing that we can achieve what we wants gives us the courage, clarity and capacity to say ‘no’ to the things we don’t and ‘yes’ to the things we do want.

This just makes one happier. The more happier, competent people there are in the world – the better. Happy, competent people typically don’t spend their time doing negative things. And so, the world becomes a better place when we become better people.

This is such a cool principle to me that I almost feel guilty (must be my Irish-Catholic roots) for elucidating such an optimistic principle. There are obviously many caveats to the principle, but in broad strokes it’s true.

Which gets to the heart of why I’m writing this post. I’ve noticed many of us (myself very much included) feel somehow guilty for actually being able to get to do or receive what we want in life.

It seems this often comes from a pro-social impulse to not make others feel bad who are less fortunate or skilled than ourselves. I think we often learn this in childhood through our siblings, the school system and culture.

“Tall Poppy Syndrome”, “The Law of Jante” and “Crabs in a Bucket” are all colloquial expressions that directly capture this phenomenon.

Wikipedia defines the “Law of Jante” as “denoting a social attitude of disapproval towards expressions of individuality and personal success.”. Problems of true arrogance and selfishness not withstanding.

This is what I have seen in myself and many of my talented and successful friends and acquaintances. Through a hamstrung sense of egalitarianism, they play to the lowest common denominator.

These people (myself included) are often sensitive to how they’re perceived and impact people in their environments. We often received messages from our friends, family and environments growing up that it’s not ok to be exceptional because it makes people around us jealous, uncomfortable, sad, etc.

But I believe that impulse (though noble) when it manifests as not being able to celebrate our gifts honestly is deeply misguided.

Instead of a fundamentally pessimistic, miserly and fearful sense of egalitarianism, we can inhabit and expand in one from a sense of our true individuality and gifts. We can instead choose to live through a sense of egalitarianism based on individuality.

This sense of individuality holds that we are all equal through our own exceptional gifts. These gifts may and will differ in all manner of degrees. Some gifts may be more commonplace, but every individual is given a hand of cards that they can maximize in life to their own satisfaction.

From this place, when we discover how to do that for ourselves, we can in turn aid others in doing the same. This all takes place on the full spectrum of life; from the humane and interpersonal, to massive achievements that shapes the course of history.

And that, I believe is not only verifiably true, it also seems to be categorically good. Which, to me, is not only philosophically satisfying but also, objectively fucking awesome.

Ok, I now retire from my Word Doc soap box.

Without further ado, here’s what I’m celebrating and savoring in the following categories from the year 2024:

·       Goals

o   I achieved a lifelong goal of serving in the military in Europe in a role that I like and am suited to. Not only was this a major adventure and professional development experience, more importantly for me I was able to honor all the men and women, who have sacrificed so much more, who went before me. This is something I’m beyond grateful to have done and wish that as a society we reflected on and acted upon honoring our men and women in the armed services with more veracity.

o   I achieved another two bucket list goals that I’ll include together. I spent a total of almost 2-months traveling around Europe. I spent 5 days doing the El Camino in northern Spain. Not only were these adventures amazingly culturally enriching, but I met so many cool and interesting people. I saw parts of the world in their naked beauty and ugliness and I met a significant physical endurance challenge steeped in history and beauty.

·       People

o    I was able to play an instrumental role in helping a work colleague I like and admire get a job. The job not only would allow him to enjoy good career progression, but give him the opportunity to live in Europe with his newlywed wife. She’s from a European country and working on immigrating to the US. It’ll help them transition to a new life together, which I hope lasts a long time.

o   I was able to help foster a reconciliation between two of my best friends from high school. A group of 6 of us have all been friends for 10+ years now, growing into young men. There was a falling out between the two of them several years ago over, you guessed it, a girl. Time healing most wounds, both of them matured and saw through the BS. We finally all hungout as friends again after ~3 years of stalemate. Very grateful.

·       Love

o   I have finally jumped the terrifying chasm of saying ‘I love you’ to someone I care about in the context of a long-term monogamous relationship for the first time since becoming a quasi-sentient adult and/or my last serious girlfriend (when I was a junior in high school)

o   Long time coming

·       Reduction

o   I dramatically reduced the consumption of superfluous, psychologically and emotionally toxic consumable media over this past year in terms of porn, social media and most other forms of ‘popular’ media writ-large

§  So much of media in our ecosystem is a parasitic, one-sided relationship (if not totally, then it is usually heavily weighted in one direction.)

§  I realized this experientially while being deployed in an area of the world where ‘major’ new stories were taking place almost daily. These stories should have been affected me. In fact, they rarely effected my life in any meaningful way, for better or for worse.

§  This improvement in my life isn’t ecstatic, satisfying or joyful in the same way some of other goals are. Instead, it’s an enjoyment of a significant increase in clarity, calm and integrity on a daily basis. Which are, for all intents and purposes, priceless.

Though I’ve made many mistakes with the following principles; two actionable practices I have found to be instrumental in helping to work through the challenges of making these enjoyable outcomes a reality:

·       Don’t hide feelings from yourself

·       Say what you need to say to the people who need to hear it

They’re so simple they may seem trite. To quote the indomitable Jocko Willink – ‘Simple isn’t easy.’ But with time and practice, they get easier.

And man, will you reap the results if you work this stuff. And they come straight from a book I’ve found very inspiring along my way - “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks.

All-in-all, this has been one of the best years of my life.

I’m so grateful for all the wonderful people in my life who I get to know and interact with, for the cool things I’ve seen and done. Coming from a place where growing up sometimes felt like prison, 10 years ago where I was burgeoning on suicide... it’s surreal.

I’ve (in my own estimation) become far more patient, accepting and relaxed. And I want to keep growing in these ways. And perhaps most-importantly; I’m someone my younger self would respect.

And hence this post.

I am just humbled by how good life can be. I’m not blind to the crazy, the bad and the ugly. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by it in fact. But man, overall, life is good. Especially when we work at it.

Thank you for reading, much love and wishing you a great upcoming New Year.