#74 What you feed grows
A pre-holiday reminder about life choices
Everyone is living through a pre-holiday rush these days, and I really wanted to end the year with something inspirational. For various reasons, I kept coming back to the edition #6 that I wrote in the early days of Nat’s Notes, so I decided to reshare it with everyone.
The full context is that I learned about the death of my friend the night before I was supposed to send my application to quit Google. You know what followed next.
Initially published on June 26, 2023
Hello everyone,
I’d like to share a personal message with you today, even though it deviates from the usual professional freedom topic. It’s dedicated to a friend of mine who passed away last Thursday. She was 42 years old. We were not very close. In fact, we met in person for the first and only time in March of last year when I finally got to the part of Spain where she resided.
Our paths crossed in 2016 through mutual friends online. She had been a reader of my blog and reached out to me for career advice. Our connection continued, and in 2017, I found myself seeking her guidance as well. She recommended that I get myself a proper psychoanalyst to help me navigate through some challenges, and that advice ended up transforming my life. She had been battling a very aggressive form of cancer lately, and she passed away surrounded by her family.
On Thursday evening, I spent hours scrolling through Facebook, reading posts and memories shared by her friends. One particular phrase caught my attention, a piece of wisdom she had once shared with a close friend: “What you feed grows.”
Today, I want to share this philosophy with you.
What flourishes in our lives is not merely our abstract desires, but rather what we consistently invest our time and energy in each day. Perhaps you aspire to lose weight, become a kinder parent, or change careers.
However, abstract desires alone won’t bring us any closer to realizing our dreams. Only through small, everyday efforts can we make tangible progress.
Reflect on what you feed in your life, what receives your time and energy day in and day out. Have an honest conversation with yourself and do a reality check. You will see what will grow in your life in the years to come.
If your dreams (whatever they may be, whether a fulfilling career or finding love) are constantly overshadowed by an endless list of household chores, then it is those chores that will thrive while your aspirations remain stagnant.
Depressing math that brings you opportunities
Making this inventory is scary. But combined with a forward-looking approach, it allows you to get a new perspective. Tim Urban wrote a column for the NYTimes about depressing life math. Once you visualize the human life span, it becomes clear that so many parts of life we think of as “countless” are in fact quite countable.
Assuming his parents will still be alive when he is in his 60s, Urban estimates they have around 30 more years of coexistence. Based on their current interaction frequency, this would amount to only 300 more days spent with his parents, which is less than the time he spent with them during any single year of their childhood. He concludes that he has already used up 93% of his in-person parent time since graduating from high school and is currently in the last 5% of that time. That example was quite sobering for me.
But there is also good news in this depressing math: you can make choices. The time we have left to do something is not a law of nature, but a function of priorities and choices. But most of us greatly underestimate the size of the lush green tree of possibilities that lies ahead of us.
So whatever you have been dreaming of, start doing something in this direction today.
As Timo Maas said in his song: It’s the first day of the rest of your life
Until next time!
Nat
📚 To read:
How Covid Stole Our Time and How We Can Get It Back - Tim Urban’s column for the New York Times about the life math that he wrote in 2020
Your life in weeks - his original blog post about the depressing life math from 2014