What Should I Do?

There are a few things that I learnt in school that have really stuck in my head - where I've been so excited to learn about them that they went straight into long term memory.

A lot of the stuff in Psychology 101 is like that for me. When I went to university I knew nothing about psychology, but I thought it would be the coolest thing to learn about. Imagine, finding out how people think, feel, remember, behave, and so on! I ended up taking the course twice, since The Superhero took it first, and I tagged along to the lectures, and then I took it myself later.

Anyhow, a whole bunch of the stuff we learnt in that class stayed with me, and one of them is the hierarchy of needs. The idea is that there are different levels of needs, from very basic (shelter, food) to more sophisticated (sense of belonging, purpose), and you don't care about the upper levels until you've satisfied the lower ones.

There's something to this theory: if you ever hear people talking about times when they didn't have enough to eat, all they can talk about is wanting food. They don't care about anything else. Same thing whenever you go through a major life transition; you don't really care about anything else until your life is back in order.

I find myself recently with the weird difficulty of struggling with the needs at the top of the pyramid. I can recall the second-to-last semester of university in which we had baby twins to care for and The Superhero and I were both in school full time; we were totally focused on the everyday demands of life and getting through the term without failing a course of losing a baby. But now, as we ease out of the super-hard work section of our life, I feel a weird kind of emptiness that comes from getting exactly what you asked for.

The Superhero and I basically have it figured out. The bills get paid. We're healthy. Our family is happy. We have friends. We have hobbies. We have no "real problems". In fact it's typical for The Superhero or I to catch the other complaining about something relatively unimportant and say "Please talk to me when you have a Real Problem.".

So I find myself with this funny kind of life-optimization problem. I think to myself "Ok, so now what?". I'm 27 now. I'm going to die when I'm 80 or so. That's a lot of time in the middle! Today I have extra time and energy over and above what I need to keep the basics of life flowing smoothly. As time goes on, I'll have only more... the kids will get more independent and eventually leave, The Superhero and I will have more spare money, etc.

So what should I do? What will my future 80-year old self wish I had done? I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this, but most of it is probably wrong, and I don't know anything about how it fits together. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts on how to improve my life, in no particular order:

• The key to happiness seems to be improvement. It doesn't matter where you are, happiness seems to be all about how quickly things are getting better. I don't know what this means in terms of a plan, but there you have it.


• It makes me really happy to start to learn about something new, or start learning a new skill or hobby. So I think I should do that a lot.


• As the kids get older, I can teach them everything. I've learnt most of the easy stuff, but they don't even know how to add yet! So I can teach them stuff, both academic and life-skill-wise.


• I think I'm missing out on a bunch of life by not being open to people. Meeting people exposes you a whole lot of randomness and different points of view that you wouldn't otherwise think of. For instance I'm reading a book called Classic Feynman, which is a collection of talks that Richard Feynman gave, and I've learnt from him to translate complicated things into things that I understand very clearly before thinking further.


• I think I should learn about everything. The library is full of books about everything you could ever think of! I believe there's a limitless source of books I'd be really excited to read, so there's no excuse for being bored when there's a public library where I'm living.


• One of my favourite things to do is have fun with The Superhero. So I'll always do a lot of that too.

As you can see I really have no idea what I'm doing here. A bunch of swirling ideas, but nothing concrete. So, blogworld of limitless wisdom, what should I do? I've been put in charge of this healthy 27-year old body, in an affluent democratic country in a wonderful family. I don't have any of the problems that most people in the world have (y'know, like getting food). So what's next?