The way is the way

---

Because if you’re willing to go through all the battling you got to go through to get where you want to get, who’s got the right to stop you?

Rocky Balboa

---

When I was in high school, I was driven by getting into a good college. This was the first step in the dream of curing cancer, the disease that took my father. The late nights and weekends spent studying for final exams and standardized tests, going to college fairs, figuring out what schools had the best neuroscience programs, and all of that, were perfectly in line with what I wanted out of life. The sacrifice was worth it.

When I was in college, I was driven by getting into a good graduate school. This was the next step in the dream of curing cancer. I first had to figure out whether I wanted a MD, a PhD, or both. Long story short, I went with PhD in the end. The late nights and weekends spent studying when I could have been spending more time with friends, partying, going on trips, and things of that nature, were perfectly justified.

When I was in graduate school, I was driven by getting the PhD in cancer biology. Now curing cancer turned out to be much more complicated than simply one person figuring it out. But I still wanted to contribute to the best of my ability. The late nights and weekends spent in lab or at my laptop when I could have been working a job with upward mobility that paid a livable wage (for me, the big opportunity cost was the fitness industry) and getting my young adult non-working life underway was perfectly justified.

When I got my PhD, I was driven by getting a good postdoc where I could continue working evenings and weekends for a wage that rivals that of a bus driver, so I could take on a second postdoc where I could do the same well into my 40s so I could wait for some professor to die in some region of the US where I have no family so I could take their job and maybe get tenure in 5-10 years if I published enough papers, while my dream to cure cancer continued to unravel as I realized how complicated cancer is, and an ecology of existential catastrophic risks started to compete for my attention…..

Wait, what??

The key thing here was that getting a PhD was a bit of a let-down. I want to emphasize that I don't regret it. I was very fortunate to have found a great thesis lab at a fantastic research institution, and I am doing work that I enjoy right now, and making a more livable wage than the academic track would offer me.

The key point here is that I looked at the PhD as something that would feel like crossing the finish line of a race or scoring the winning goal in a soccer game. I thought I would feel overjoyed. Don't get me wrong, I was relieved to be done with it. But the PhD was this light at the end of a long tunnel that started with the choice to sacrifice fun for work and study in high school. What was at the end of the tunnel?

Nothing.

There was nothing at the end of the tunnel. Just more tunnels with lights at the end of it. There was the postdoc to professor tunnel. When I left academia, there was the "go up the corporate hierarchy" tunnel. When I started my company, there was the "grow my company aggressively and sell it to a big pharma company and then have a bunch of money (and then buy a bunch of stuff)" tunnel. On the family side, it was the "get married and then have a kid and then work harder so you can make more money to get a bigger house and have a second and third kid" tunnel.

This has been studied by psychologists. It's called the hedonic treadmill. The punchline is whatever goal you achieve will make you happier than baseline for a limited period of time. Then you'll return to baseline and find yourself chasing the next thing. I learned about this concept when I was considering to move into a bigger place (after moving into a bigger place not long ago). Good timing.

In light of seeing that the end of the tunnel is a hedonic treadmill of more tunnels, I have learned that being ambitious, purpose-driven, and goal-oriented has a huge failure mode. It's called middle age.

My life used to be very simple. I lost my father to cancer, and I was going to cure it. While I still do cancer research today, one big thing changed in the past few years that allowed me to see things a bit more clearly. I became older than my father. He died when he was 35. At the time of writing, I am going on 37. I got the idea that he'd probably want me to live my life, and not be a 65 year old still focused on avenging my 35 year old father's death.

So if my life is no longer unilateral, what happens next? What's the meaning of life? What is all of this for? There is a lot more to life than curing cancer. There are a lot more diseases that are wreaking havoc on the world. There are plenty of existential catastrophic risks that could wipe out humanity entirely. Importantly, there is plenty to being human that does not involve work.

My legacy code of spending every waking moment on the next big goal or the next big step, defining myself by my work, and setting that as my "purpose in life" is not appropriate anymore. And this brings me to a key point: I don't think searching for the meaning of life is appropriate anymore.

---

Other people have purpose;
I alone don't know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching.

---

When the first lockdown happened, I spent a lot of time reading. There were a handful of books that really came together with the same message. Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (a particular vignette near the end) and a more recent book Atomic Habits by James Clear, had the same message: focus on the way, not the goal. The way is not meant to be described in words, but you know when you've strayed from it.

It started to make sense in light of critically looking at my day-to-day life. I've written before about the Flow State and how that drives a lot of the minutia of my activities. My bioinformatics work involves me exploring the interaction between new data and new algorithms. In the moment, I'm thinking about the process and not the goal. But doing it this way, the goal happens. A large part of my life is around fitness. I have my fitness goals but they don't drive me. When I work out, I'm engrossed in the process, rep by rep, mile by mile. For what it's worth, I've been able to keep up my gym habits since 1999, so I think being process-oriented speaks to the long game. Music is similar. I spend my practice sessions mainly tinkering and I lose myself in it. I improve as a side effect.

I have been getting into mindfulness meditation as of late, and it hits the same point from a completely different angle. You hear the same realization from the Buddhists to the Taoists: there is only right now. I used to try to meditate when I was a teenager, but I stopped after a while. The problem was that I just wanted to hit enlightenment, and I didn't have the patience to meditate for 40 years to achieve some brain state that only happens when you meditate for 40 years. I only became able to meditate when I realized that it you have to give up the goal of enlightenment entirely and simply focus on the process. Spoiler alert: there are a lot more benefits to meditation that come long before hitting any sort of enlightenment.

Be it flow state or meditation, both provide the insight that you spend the majority of your time in a process toward a goal. I spent a decade pursuing a PhD but only a few days or so actually celebrating it. Then it was time to pursue the next thing and the next thing.

I think it's perfectly fine to have goals. I think to get through school, college, graduate school, and a lot of the working world, you do have to be goal-driven. I think the mistake is to decide that you're going to put off happiness until you reach your goal. If I could roll back the clock to 16 years old again, I don't think I'd change anything. The only thing I'd do differently is to be a bit more present and enjoy the process. Because that's all there is.

Now this brings us back to the meaning of life. What is the meaning of life? What is the point? The best answer I have ever heard was from neuroscientist and meditator Sam Harris. He said that the meaning of life is to be so immersed in the moment that you don't even think to ask the question "what is the meaning of life."

Don't focus on the point. The way is the way.