What Do I Want From Life?

15 April 2026 - 13 mins read time
Tags: Philosophy Life Personal Reflection

What Do I Want From Life?

mountain trail

Photo by John Shorb on Unsplash

I’ve asked myself this question a lot. What do I want from life? Or maybe the better version: What shall I do with the rest of my life?

It sounds simple. It isn’t. It’s the kind of question that arrives uninvited at 2 AM, or on a long run when your legs are burning and your mind finally goes quiet enough to hear it. It’s the question beneath every career decision, every relationship, every Sunday evening when you realize the weekend is already gone and you’re not sure what you actually did with it.

I don’t have a final answer. But I’ve spent enough time with the question to have learned a few things—mostly by getting the answer wrong repeatedly.

The Lists and Strategies Phase

I made a lot of lists. Career goals. Fitness milestones. Books to read. Skills to acquire. Places to visit. Financial targets. I had spreadsheets and Notion boards and journals full of carefully structured ambitions. Quarterly reviews where I’d assess progress against my stated objectives.

And I think lists and strategies are important. Genuinely. Without them, you drift. You wake up five years later and realize you’ve been reactive the entire time—responding to whatever the world put in front of you rather than pursuing anything with intention. Lists create direction. Strategies create momentum. Both are better than nothing.

But here’s what I learned the hard way: fulfilling the list doesn’t create fulfillment.

I’d check the box—ship the project, hit the revenue target, finish the race, earn the certification—and feel… fine. Good, even. For about a day. Then the void would open back up and I’d need the next thing. The next goal. The next checkbox.

We’ve all seen this. It’s the hedonic treadmill applied to meaning itself. You’re always waiting for the completion of something—a promotion, a launch, a move, a milestone—and when it arrives, the satisfaction is real but temporary. The horizon recedes. The next mountain appears. And you’re climbing again before you’ve even stood at the summit long enough to look around.

This isn’t a flaw in goal-setting. It’s a feature of how human motivation works. Goals are useful for direction, but they’re terrible at providing lasting meaning. The finish line was never the point.

The Waiting-for-Completion Trap

The most insidious version of this is what I call “waiting for completion.” It goes like this:

The structure is always the same: present sacrifice in exchange for future fulfillment. And it works—briefly. You get the thing, you feel the rush, and for a moment, everything seems right.

But then the feeling fades. Not because the achievement wasn’t real, but because completion was never what you were actually craving. You were craving something deeper, and you confused it with a milestone.

I’ve been through enough cycles of this to recognize the pattern. After my layoff, I had a summer with no goals beyond health and exploration. No job to chase, no project to ship, no deadline to meet. And paradoxically, it was the most alive I’d felt in years. Not because I’d completed something, but because I’d stopped waiting to.

So What Is Exciting?

If completion doesn’t create lasting fulfillment, what does? What actually makes life feel worth living?

I’ve been sitting with this question for a while, and my best answer so far is this: it’s to feel alive.

That sounds circular—of course you want to feel alive, you’re alive—but it’s not. There’s a profound difference between existing and feeling alive. Between going through the motions and being genuinely present in your own life. Between surviving the week and actually living it.

Feeling alive isn’t about pleasure, comfort, or ease. Those things are nice, but they don’t make you feel alive—they make you feel comfortable. Comfortable is pleasant. Alive is something else entirely.

Alive is the feeling you get standing on a mountain ridge at dawn, legs burning, lungs full of cold air. Alive is the flow state when you’re deep in a problem and hours disappear. Alive is the raw honesty of a real conversation with someone you love. Alive is the moment after a hard workout when you’re collapsed on the floor and everything hurts and you’re grinning.

So how do you feel alive? I’ve identified three channels that work for me: pain, presence, and intentional work.

Pain: The Paradox of Suffering

This is the one nobody wants to hear, but it might be the most important.

Pain makes you feel alive. Not all pain, and not senseless pain, but the kind of voluntary discomfort that strips away the numbness of routine.

I discovered this through running. Not the easy jogs—the long mountain runs where your quads are screaming and you’re not sure you can take another step. The 50K ultra where miles 20-25 were a dark place and quitting seemed like the only rational choice. The predawn trail runs in winter rain where you can’t feel your fingers.

In those moments, there is no abstraction. No anxiety about the future, no rumination about the past. Just the immediate, undeniable reality of your body in space, struggling forward. The pain is a portal to presence. It forces you into the now with a violence that no meditation app can match.

And here’s the paradox: after the pain, you feel more alive than before. Not just relieved—genuinely, deeply alive. The contrast between the discomfort and the return to baseline creates a vividness that bleeds into everything else. Food tastes better. Sleep feels deeper. Conversations are more engaging. The world is sharper.

This isn’t masochism. It’s the recognition that comfort is anesthetic, and that some amount of voluntary suffering is necessary to stay awake in your own life.

The mountain doesn’t care about your career. The trail doesn’t care about your social media. The cold doesn’t care about your five-year plan. And that indifference is liberating. It strips away everything except the raw fact of being a body, in a place, doing something hard.

Other Forms of Pain

Running is my primary channel, but it’s not the only one. Cold exposure, fasting, hard training, difficult conversations, honest self-assessment—these all involve a form of discomfort that, when chosen intentionally, produces aliveness.

The key word is chosen. Involuntary suffering—illness, loss, failure—doesn’t produce the same effect. It can, eventually, if you process it well, but that’s a different thing. The pain that creates aliveness is the pain you sign up for. The discomfort you seek out because you know, on some level, that you need it.

Presence: The Antidote to Autopilot

Most of us spend most of our lives somewhere else. Physically in one place, mentally in another. Sitting in a meeting but thinking about email. Having dinner with a partner but scrolling a phone. Running on a trail but replaying a conversation from yesterday.

Presence is the practice of being where you are. Fully. Without escape.

It sounds simple. It’s incredibly difficult. The mind is a time machine that constantly projects into the future (anxiety) or replays the past (regret). The present moment—the only one that actually exists—gets crowded out by mental noise.

But when you manage to land in the present, even briefly, the effect is striking. Colors are more vivid. Sounds are clearer. Other people are more real. You notice things you’d otherwise miss—the way light falls through trees, the rhythm of your breathing, the specific quality of someone’s laugh.

How I Practice Presence

Running without headphones. Sometimes I run with music—I love it. But sometimes I leave the headphones at home and just listen. To my footsteps. To the wind. To the birds. To whatever my mind produces when it’s not being entertained. It’s uncomfortable at first, then clarifying.

Putting the phone away. Not just during meals, but during walks, during commutes, during the in-between moments that we’ve learned to fill with scrolling. Those empty moments are where presence lives, if you let them.

Being with people fully. When I’m talking to Joy, or a friend, or a colleague, I try to actually be there. Not formulating my response while they’re still talking. Not checking my watch. Just listening. It’s harder than it sounds, and it makes every interaction better.

Mountain running. The combination of physical exertion, natural beauty, and mild danger is the most reliable presence-induction I’ve found. You can’t be on a rocky trail at altitude and be somewhere else in your head. The mountain demands your attention, and in return, it gives you the present moment.

Why Presence Matters

Presence matters because life only actually happens in the present. The past is memory. The future is imagination. The only time you can feel, connect, create, or experience anything is right now. If you’re never present, you’re never actually living—you’re just planning to live, or remembering having lived.

The lists and strategies I mentioned earlier? They’re future-oriented by nature. They’re about what’s coming next. Useful for direction, but if you’re always living in the next milestone, you’re never living in the only moment that’s real.

Intentional Work: Building Something That Matters

The third channel is intentional work—work that you choose because it matters, not because you have to, or because it looks good, or because it checks a box.

There’s a profound difference between work you’re assigned and work you’ve chosen. Between executing someone else’s vision and building your own. Between optimizing for a review and optimizing for impact.

At the hyper-growth startup, I worked 90-hour weeks. The hours were brutal, but the work was intentional—I could see the impact, I had autonomy, I was building something I believed in. The exhaustion was real, but so was the aliveness. I wasn’t just putting in time; I was pouring myself into something that mattered to me.

Contrast that with periods of my career where I was going through the motions—showing up, doing competent work, collecting the paycheck. Comfortable? Yes. Alive? Not even close.

What Makes Work Intentional

Intentional work has three characteristics:

  1. You chose it. Not grudgingly, not by default, but deliberately. You could have done something else, and you chose this.

  2. It connects to something larger. It’s not just a task; it’s part of a project, a mission, a body of work that accumulates over time. It has stakes beyond the immediate deliverable.

  3. It requires you to grow. Intentional work sits at the edge of your abilities. It’s not easy, and it’s not impossible—it’s the sweet spot where you have to stretch, learn, and become more capable than you were.

That’s the test: if the external rewards were removed, would you still do it? If the answer is yes, it’s intentional work. If the answer is no, it’s a checkbox.

The Trap of Optimization

There’s a trap here, and I want to name it explicitly because I fall into it constantly.

It’s tempting to turn “feeling alive” into another optimization problem. To create a system: run X miles per week, meditate Y minutes per day, do Z hours of intentional work. To track and measure and optimize your way to aliveness.

But aliveness doesn’t work like that. It’s not a metric. It’s not something you can game. The moment you try to systematize it, you’ve already killed it—because systematization is the opposite of presence. You’re living in the metric instead of the moment.

Lists and strategies have their place. Use them for direction. Use them to avoid drifting. But don’t confuse the map with the territory. The list is not the life. The strategy is not the experience. The goal is not the feeling.

The feeling is the point. And the feeling comes from pain, presence, and intentional work—not from the spreadsheet that tracks how much of each you did this week.

What I Actually Want

So what do I want from life? After all the lists and the false starts and the completed milestones that didn’t deliver what I hoped, here’s where I’ve landed:

I want to feel alive. Not all the time—that would be exhausting. But more often than not. I want the days to have texture—some discomfort, some presence, some meaningful work. I want to be in my body, in my relationships, in my work, not just adjacent to them.

I want to run mountains with Joy and come home to Simba and Sasha. I want to build things that matter. I want to have hard conversations and honest friendships. I want to stay fit and stay curious and stay kind.

I want to stop waiting for completion. The project will never be fully done. The list will never be fully checked. The milestone will never be the moment. The moment is now—this breath, this step, this sentence.

That’s not a strategy. It’s not a goal. It’s a practice. And it’s the only answer I’ve found that doesn’t evaporate the morning after I achieve it.

For You

If you’re asking yourself the same question—what do I want from life?—here’s what I’d offer, not as advice but as observation:

  1. Make the lists. They help. They give you direction and prevent drift. Just don’t confuse them with the destination.

  2. Notice when you’re waiting for completion. The “once I X, then I’ll Y” structure is a trap. X will arrive, and Y won’t follow. Start Y now.

  3. Seek voluntary discomfort. Not suffering for its own sake, but challenge that forces you into the present. The kind of hard that makes you feel your own existence.

  4. Practice presence. Put the phone down. Listen to the person across from you. Run without headphones sometimes. Be where you are.

  5. Do intentional work. Find something you’d do even if nobody was watching, even if it didn’t advance your career, even if it didn’t check a box. Do that thing.

  6. Don’t optimize aliveness. You can’t. It’s not a metric. It’s a feeling that emerges when the conditions are right, and the conditions include not trying too hard to manufacture it.

The question what do I want from life? is worth asking. But the answer isn’t a destination. It’s a way of traveling. And the traveling feels best when it hurts a little, when you’re actually present for it, and when you’re building something you chose.

That’s what I’ve got so far. I’ll let you know if I figure out anything else.