My life is pretty good overall. I\u2019m married to my best friend whom I\u2019ve known for 25 years, and we have a beautiful baby boy. Creatively and professionally I\u2019m living my dream, which is that I make a living writing about things that I want to write about. I\u2019m friends with people that I respect and admire. I technically have a lot of freedom to do whatever I want\u2013 this has been temporarily constrained by the challenge of parenting a 1-year-old, but overall, the fundamentals are sound. I\u2019m financially doing okay, and I can see a path to continually doing better. My younger selves would be thrilled to hear how I\u2019m doing; many of them were genuinely concerned that I was not gonna make it altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet, despite all of that, I feel a general unease, like there\u2019s something missing, something that\u2019s probably in plain sight that I\u2019m not seeing. So I run through the usual checklist. It\u2019s true that I\u2019m not getting enough sleep, I\u2019m not spending enough time with friends apart from my immediate family, I would probably benefit from more exercise, and I could manage my inspirations better. But these 4 things have always been true about me to varying degrees, so that doesn\u2019t feel like the main thing. My sense is that there\u2019s some bottleneck that I\u2019m barely even perceiving correctly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing that\u2019s true is that I have a sprawling todo list that has maybe gotten out of control. As I write this, I notice that I have two different bookmarks to separate Google Docs in my bookmarks tab, one pointing to \u201ctodo\u201d and another pointing to \u201cVoltaic\u201d (which is the temporary-and-therefore-probably-final name for my one-man publishing company). I recently learned that gdocs allows you to have multiple tabs on the same page, so I copy out the full text of Voltaic, and move it into a new tab in my todo doc. I delete the tab. And I feel a tiny relief. Alright. That\u2019s good. I probably need to do several more things like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n