An essay in which my friend feels stuck and I suggest relaxing some constraints

Some examples of constraints I had to unlearn to make my life tractable: I used to think my day job needed to feel meaningful, rather than act as a funding scheme for my projects; I used to think that I had to write in Swedish, that I needed to have a publisher, and that I couldn’t write essays because no one reads essays in Sweden. All of this mad... See more

This makes me realize that what I said earlier in this essay is not enough. You can’t simply list what you want to do and figure out how to do more of that. You also need to surface the unarticulated constraints that you have floating around, and that are making what you were born to do needlessly hard or impossible. You must bring into light the h... See more

He is treating “doing the default thing” as a constraint, I think. This is a very broad and problematic constraint. It blocks nearly everything else he cares about.

For me, who does not operate with the same assumptions as my friend (though I surely have my own limiting beliefs!), listening to him sometimes feels like being in Lars von Trier’s Dogvi... See more

“Ok, but what if you think more concretely about what you want to do? Like, what are the precise day-to-day activities that make you feel alive and proud of yourself?”

Regarding music, the activities he actually likes are (1) coming up with new songs and (2) performing live.

“What would be the most effective way to design your life so that you get to... See more

But the point is: you have to loosen some constraints to give yourself a chance at solving the key problems: they are hard enough in themselves. If you impose as many constraints on yourself as the average person does, the likelihood that you will pull off what is most central to you approaches zero. So, seek clarity on which constraints are real a... See more