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I quit my job today. I do not have another one lined up, and before getting this job I was out of work for months. I know quite a few people struggling to find work. It doesn’t feel like a smart thing to do, but I was miserable at work. The kind of totalizing miserable feeling that creates dissociation during the workday and persists in my body the way the intensity of a noxious fume lives on as a headache.

I am experiencing this as a setback, as a blow, and as a destabilization of my self-image. Part of my self-image has been that when push comes to shove, I can do anything I have to. Another important part of that self-image is that when faced with a set of choices, I make the smartest and most pragmatic choice.

I feel uncomfortable because over the past few years I have felt myself being pushed away from the zone of easily identifiable pragmatic choices. At every step, I think I have been making rational, good choices, with appropriate sized risks. And yet, I am struggling in a way that I didn’t imagine that I would. If I’m being forced to make riskier choices, what do I hope to gain?

An influential thing I read once was about doing a small amount of progress toward known goals. It was a comment on Reddit, summed up as “no zero days”: aiming for no days where zero progress is made toward goals.

Having no goals sounds hard, having too many goals, seeing goals everywhere—also hard. Today I’m in a bit of a manic place regarding near term future, so I’m noting down some short term goals to work off of.

Here are my parameters:

• Only five goals, because that’s the number of fingers I have. Other numbers could work, but this seems about right to me.
• Everything other than these goals can get filtered out or is leisure. The important thing about this is that I am giving myself permission to release any feelings of guilt associated with not making progress toward a goal if it isn’t one of the five chosen goals.
• Goals can be abandoned, but if I abandon it I need to reflect on why. It would be good to capture what the real roadblocks I encountered were or what in my motivation shifted such that the goal didn’t feel worthwhile anymore.
• No ongoing, habit formation goals. Only goals with real concrete targets, end dates. Nothing longer than 6 months out, for that matter.
• Make real reflections about what motivations are and what values the goals are rooted in.

And here are my first set of goals:

1. Find employment (until completed): This goal will be completed when I accept an offer of employment. This is in service of working toward financial independence and in support of my partner.
2. Write a song for an open mic (May 17th) : I have many musical and performance goals, but for right now I want to narrow my efforts to putting together an original song for an open mic night a few blocks away from my house.
3. Complete SwiftUI tutorial track (June 20): I think it would be a shame to let my programming skills go. I am suited to it and would like to do it as a career. If I tackle two tutorial chunks a day, I can have this finished by my birthday.
4. Daily knee rehab until resuming appointments on May 27: I lost the habit of completing PT exercises for my patella tendon. I want to do them daily until resuming appointments on or about May 27.
5. Improve Spanish ahead of my honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta (August 29): This one is fairly straightforward.

Wish me luck, and wish me no zero days!

I’m a builder’s son. My father was a Northern California ski bum in the 70’s. There was a building boom going on. Construction jobs were easy to get, and they suited his lifestyle. Later, the construction industry got much more professionalized and licensed. A generation of lucky tradesmen got to keep licenses that were much easier to get than those that their apprentices were earning. My dad wasn’t particularly good at any one trade, but his ability to nose out a loophole was the best in the business. He recognized that the door was not going to be open forever. He paid the testing fees and ended up with full Electrician, Plumber, HVAC, and General Contractor licenses.

Now, as when I was a kid, getting a conversation going with my dad takes a lot of work. We have two safe topics always available to us: “I heard this piece of classical music recently,” and “I wonder how they built that?”

As a side effect of trying to connect with my dad, I learned a lot about building and architectural designs.

I developed an appreciation for well-constructed buildings. Buildings that suit their purpose. Buildings that were designed with integrity. Buildings that are solid enough to be repurposed.

Things that look expensive can be cheap. Things that are actually expensive can have no integrity in their design. Buildings are designed for someone, ideally the people that will use it. Often not. These are some of the things you think about when you notice the quality of construction around you.

A well designed, beautiful space can fill you with a sense of tranquility and abundance. Good design makes the activities that will take place in the space easier. Bad design adds friction.

There’s both delight and sadness when I am surprised by the beauty of an old building or public space. Beauty delights me. The bittersweet surprise is that this group, in this place, at one time, were worth spending enough money on to build something nice.