Instant thought – people are out having a good time in this summer evening and I should be out there too.

This FOMO anxiety is the real deal. I feel like everyone is living a better life than me. Having more fun. I feel guilty for not finding something to do to enjoy that summer evening, even though I had just had a lovely dinner with my partner.

It’s a whole new angle on my anxiety that I’m just now starting to be aware of. It’s connected to why I over-plan weekends. Or why during the current thing (dinner, stroll, dancing), I’m planning the next one. I’m always thinking about the optimal way to get everything in.

Really really detracts from my ability to be present.

And I think that if I were able to be present with my current activity, serendipity would happen and I would find myself enjoying that evening in a healthy and organic way. For sometimes if you over-plan, you’re underwhelmed, and disappointed.

I’m thrilled to be observing these thought patterns. Awareness is always the first step.

As I get older, and my job and my personal life seem to get more serious, I feel like I’m constantly behind.

Throw in some hobbies, a side-hustle or two, and a writing practice, and I feel like I’m constantly coming up short.

I’ve often heard that life is about sacrifices. To do anything well requires focus.

I think I have a form of anxiety related to FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.

There’s so much I want to do and be good at – salsa dancing, jiujitsu, chess, building a game-changing deep technology startup that helps clean up the planet, Spanish.

Travel the world, father some children, spend time with the friends and family that I love being around. Go to concerts and dance parties. Oh and I still need to do errands, go to the doctor, clear up that issue with customer service, make food and coffee and clean up and shower and laundry.

What can I cut out? What is #1? Some of the most successful people seem to have made their business their one and only – everything else is secondary. Seems miserable.

Warren Buffet says to pick something like 25 things you’d like to do and then circle the top 5 and forget everything else. Let’s try:

1. My partner
2. Friends/Family
3. Health? Seems important
4. Work
5. Spending time in nature?

Pretty hard to do.

I guess there is no answer here. It’s just one of those things that’s frustrating and beautiful about life. There is so much good shit out there.

Makes me think of Steve Jobs’ messy desk. It just kept piling on and I’m quite sure he had a lot going on. But he made some pretty cool shit. And he did believe in focus and saying no to the 100 other good ideas that are out there.

I just need to be okay with the proverbial messy desk. And keep a few good priorities. The rest will happen or it won’t.

Fuck social media.

It gets things out of your head and onto paper.

There’s nothing like the feeling of getting started in the morning, seated at your computer, and being completely unsure of what to work on.

I feel like my life is chaos.

So many things I need to work on. So many more things I want to work on. Then there’s all the shit that I don’t want to work on but I have to do/deal with and this list only seems to grow as I get older.

The plan the night before will help identify what is most important so that I can start there in the morning and focus on those key items throughout the day, particularly as new issues pop up, requests from colleagues, fires to put out, etc.

But another thing to try to hone for which I don’t have an answer quite yet is the skill of triaging. There may be things on my To Do list that I’ll simply never get to. Definitely things on my ‘To Read’ list.

It’s an art trying to see a whole pile of stuff that you want to do and figuring out how to do the most important / impactful stuff.

Our brains want us to do the easiest things. These are usually not the most impactful.

I guess I could use a little more Eisenhower’s urgent/important principal matrix in my life. I’ll add it to the To Do list.

It follows a multi-decade story of a woman who leaves Korea and her childhood sweetheart, only to be reunited and separated with him a couple more times. The woman gets married to an American man, but the story chronicles this feeling of ‘what if’ with her childhood sweetheart.

It’s a feeling I think we’re all familiar with. Wondering how different our lives could be. Especially when it comes to love it can be quite powerful and painful. I try to describe it as feelings of nostalgia dripping with longing.

Spoiler (sorry): At the end, the woman’s current partner, who is not her past love, comforted her as she cried about the pain of longing and wondering ‘what if’ she had instead gone with her childhood sweetheart.

What’s beautiful about this moment is that the current partner, Arthur, loves her and supports her in her pain and longing. How incredibly mature. It’s what we do as adults – we choose and decide on our partnerships and companions. It isn’t something necessarily dictated by circumstance and hormones.

The loves we had when we were young were so hormone-heavy and intense. Of course when we miss them and think about them it digs deep into our soul. We felt alive. Romantic. Raw.

This movie was incredible because it dug those feelings up for me. It painted a perfect picture of what those feelings are like.

And I was just left in awe of the story teller and filmmaker’s art – how they can tell a story so perfectly that it evokes such a nuanced feeling from me. That’s what art in all forms is all about. The feelings it evokes. Again I’m just in awe how talented someone can be to do that to some stranger watching their art.

The theme of the movie is about In-Yun. A concept in Korea, akin to divine providence that connects people across multiple lives, usually related to love. I’ve been fortunate to benefit from In-Yun. And my mind explodes thinking about how many wonderful people and experiences I’m connected to that have brought me exactly here to this little cafe somewhere, writing this.

These are the words that Mary Carlin, the mother of the great comedian George Carlin, inscribed in his yearbook.  

It took him a number of tries but he consistently reoriented and iterated his work to be the truest expression of himself.

It must be so freeing. And the best way to do truly good work.

Am I being my true self? In all ways?

I should ask this more.

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