On not having goals..

And how weird that feels, or maybe how ok that feels.. An examination of that time in one's life where there is an absence of goals, but no absence of a superficial drive to achieve..

Dear cherished friend,

There’s nothing that matches the joy of writing again. This joy is tainted in so many ways. This was not my attempt to escape from writing, rather an attempt of writing to escape me. I’m grateful that I’m able to think in a way that allows me to line up my thoughts again. It has been difficult, and it is still difficult to write and have the clarity of thought. At least there is clarity enough that allows me to fulfill my obligation to you (and by extension to myself), the pen or keyboard friends who are subscribed here. Let’s see..

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If you’re new here, these musings are meant to be reflections that are unfiltered, non-refined, and as much as possible, non-reviewed. The goal is to write authentically in a flow with ideas, and not to think too much about ‘audience’, but ‘ideas’. Welcome! You’ll read some weird sentences, but English as a second language, and a refusal to “refine” thoughts to the extent they don’t become genuine, are things I am ok with..

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Cherished Friend, I’ve been at a crossroads in life.

I’ve been feeling like my major moments in life have been achieved, but I also feel like there’s an emptiness within me because I don’t know where to go next. And I’ve been thinking about this feeling a lot, and what it means both in an intellectual, and in the lifespan of my life, or what I think it will be.

This is an unfathomable position of privilege to have the luxury to think of your life in this way.

Since I was in my early 20s, I had a version of a “North Star” goal which I wanted to achieve, and within that, I was constantly developing new “North Stars” to which I would redirect myself. This has been my life since I was almost 20. This chase has been ongoing for 2 decades. Now, I don’t think I have the energy anymore.

The moment I joined the engineering school, I remember I wanted to be an industrial engineer. I wasn’t able to change my major from mechanical engineering to industrial engineering, so I decided in my 2nd year of undergrad that I wanted to get an MBA. I knew this even before starting my real first job.

I remember I finished my bachelors, and from that moment I started planning and saving for my masters degree. I wanted to do the next thing, and move away from the mechanical engineering sector, and I did that.

Then I shifted my “North Star” to landing a job in the international development sector, and I did that.

Then, I applied and applied and realized that I won’t be able to beat the racism built into the immigration systems within the US, and that meritocracy is not real, and I won’t be able to grow in the humanitarian sector career where I was, and decided to move to the US. And I did that. (This involved meeting my now-wife, and a lot of other reasons and things)¹

Then I landed a job in one of the top organizations in my sector globally, and I got to keep my job after the USAID cuts.

And I moved to the apartment where I’m at now, where I feel in my own space, and in my own zone.

And I wanted to register my marriage in my home country (and it took two years of government hurdles), and I did that too.

With all that getting done, there’s no visible North Star now.

And it is unsettling..

When do we arrive?

I think of this and I’m always wondering about the ‘need’ for goals to guide our lives. This has always been instilled within us, and in a recent conversation with a friend of mine, the conversation took us to a place where my friend’s mother who is in her late 50s is still trying to figure out a way to achieve and follow new career goals, while my friend was suggesting that she needs a break.

Reading from a recent essay of

David Epstein

, where he quotes Scottie Scheffler, the elite Golfer²:

“It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for, like, a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes. That kind of euphoric feeling…You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there. It's such an amazing moment. And then it's like, okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner?”

Read More.

And it struck me, as much as I knew and read and fought against what I would call ‘counterproductive ambition’, of how much pressure do we have to fight against in order for us not to fall into the trap of ambition. The arrival is definitely a fallacy.

We’ve glorified having a ‘drive’ so much that it led some of us to literally disrupt and forgo a lot of our mental health, in the name of success, myself included.

I was also thinking of a podcast³ I was listening to where a person feels “freed” by his terminal cancer from ‘chasing the career’.

This is in clear contradiction to the manual that we are given by the necessities of the modern life that we shouldn’t have enough of, which is ‘more everything’. More success, more friends, more career growth, more wealth, more land, more properties, more food.. Just, more..

This possibly explains why there is a sense of increased happiness associated with people of faith (of which I am one, but it’s still a process of growth and mindset development), because they never really ‘arrive’ in their lifetimes. But for them, arrival is not achieved in this dimension, but in the afterlife. For that, people of faith do not concentrate on the arrival fallacy as much as people who have that constant ‘goal-making’ life. I’ve touched on something similar in my attempt to explain what it means to go through America’s immigration system in a previous post.

Enough..

I think of enough, and I wonder how trivial this life is and how trivial whatever we write is, when people in Palestine can’t find ‘enough’ food to stop being hungry and emaciated. When is genocide enough for us to stop killing children living in tents?

The first thing I remember when it comes to seeing people being ripped of life without it making any sense was when I saw images of the Rwandan genocide. I was like 9 or 10 years old max. My country was in a war when I was 5, and I remember some of that, but I do not remember being unable to think like how I am unable to think now until I saw the images of the Tutsi killing fields.

My second memory of incomprehensible violence was actually from Palestine, and specifically from Gaza.⁴

It is unconscionable that we still discuss and deliberate, and it is beyond rage and argument at this point. The world has reached a point of no return for the vast majority of witnesses on genocide. It has gone too far in such an insane direction that I am agreeing with Tucker Carlson, and actually recognizing his efforts in something. Tucker Carlson who is astonishingly racist, islamophobic, dishonest, ignorant, and conspiracy theorist. This genocide has conflated people so much that someone who doesn’t like anything about Palestinians and Muslims and Arabs is saying enough. He's not alone.

I definitely wasn’t able to write because of this. What do we write about when every day we see senseless death and we can’t lift or misdirect a single bullet, or ease the suffering of one person. What consoles us in the safety of our homes, when we know people displaced in tents can face death in their sleep, even when they’re displaced?

I don’t think there are anything left for us to say. The same way we’ve heard it multiple times, Palestinians have immeasurable faith. I pray for them that their happiness arrives for them in this life, and for those who do not arrive to it, there will be no ‘fallacy’ for them, but ‘truth’ in the next one.

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Some things I urge you to watch or listen to whenever you can:

- Theo Von (not my favorite person in the world), recently interviewed a Doctor who came back from a medical mission in Gaza. Yes, Theo isn’t the intellectual we all desire and look up to, but he’s got the courage that people with 10x his brains don’t have.

- Jon Stewart has had two amazing interviews recently:

One with Palestinian Pulitzer Prize Winner, Mosab Abu Touha, and a second with Peter Beinart. Both are important, and honest conversations, that humanize Palestinians in a way I’ve never seen before on American media. Give those a listen and a share..

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” - Nelson Mandela

📷: One of the few things that brought me joy in the last few months were the fact that I was able to look at photos again, and attempt a comeback. Click on the photos to access the full photos..

Tales of light..

Nadia Reid once said:

There is one main street in this town
There were two roads to go down
In the end I know I will reach my destination
In the end I know I will reach my destination

Thank you for coming this far.

Free Palestine. 🇵🇸

1. A bit simplistic, and there’s truth to the reductiveness. We both were going through some challenging times. Covid got in the way too, and it took years longer than it should have, but I did it still.

2. I know nothing about golf. I know I’ve seen this man’s face enough to recognize that he’s an elite golfer. Is he THAT good?

3. Strangers on a bench is my favorite podcast this year. You hear a podcast with people you don’t really know their names, but you’re able to relate to them so deeply, and that’s the point. Give it a listen!

4. Jamal Al-Durrah buried another child of his, two brothers, a niece and some other members of his family during this genocide.