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Kaj_Sotala comments on Open Thread: How much strategic thinking have you done recently? - Less Wrong Discussion
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My problem is that I have basically run out of life goals. My goals used to be: 1. Get rich 2. Get married 3. Have children + be a good father
I did 2 a number of years ago. 3 is ongoing though I've made it past the hump of actually having 1 child, and so far consensus is that I am being a good father. I'm not rich yet but progress on that is also steady and I've made it past the major hurdles such that if I continue on the path I am on I'll be rich in a few years. I've already been "high income" for awhile and that is much like being rich except a bit more stressful.
Unless life throws me a curve ball I don't have much uncertainty about achieving my major goals. I just have to keep doing what I am doing. It's unbearably boring! So now my new goal is to figure out how to actually get excited about something again without interfering with the ongoing achievement of my previous goals. So far I haven't made much progress. Any thoughts?
I would point out to people that it is utterly futile to simply suggest new goals. If OP doesn't feel already the desire to pursue them, then the desire will not appear out of nowhere simply because you uttered a few words, even if they are well-chosen reasonable words. ("Reason is, & ought only to be the slave of the passions, & can never pretend to any other office than to serve & obey them.")
What OP needs is mechanisms for generating the desire to pursue some good goal.
Off the top of my head, both travel and psychedelics seem to have nontrivial rates of inducing new goals/dreams.
Related:
That's all true, but I think that the problem for the OP is generating goals/dreams that fit inside the constraints of his life. Once you have your own family and kids the range of (non-drastic) things that you can do narrows considerably. Things like going off to live on a Polynesian island for a while, or, say, deciding to become a starving artist and create ART in capital letters -- all these become... problematic.
(The constraints of one's life shouldn't get there by mere convention, but only appear as cost of pursuing goals/dreams deemed important. You don't have to get burdened with supporting a family or professional responsibilities as you get older, if you are primarily interested in pursuing different goals that would benefit from having more time and less constraints. In particular, if your goals change, it should be possible to get rid of some of the costs required by the old goals.)
Generally speaking, yes, but note that in the specific case of the OP he has the still-active goal of being a good father.
Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?" The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"
"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
Think bigger.
Good husband, good father are as open ended as the goods possible to your wife and children in terms of health, welfare, and happiness.
A lot of people here are planning on vastly extended lifespans. That's quite a good. Whether or not you buy into that, few people do more than 1% of what can be done in terms of medical monitoring and evaluation.
You're a man of means, expecting to be of greater means. Put some of that coin to good use.
Genomic scans for everybody! Find some service that puts that into good use in evaluating metabolic pathway efficiency. Enzyme efficiency is one area that genomic scans are already useful for, IMO, particularly for drug metabolism.
Personalized supplement regimens, based on the genomic data. Monthly blood draws. Neuromuscular evaluations. Weekly massages for you and the wife. Hyperbaric oxygen. Infrared saunas.
Hook yourself up with some longevity center, and let them figure it out. Talk to that Med research service here.
There's so much that can be done, and so little of it that does get done.
May I suggest "zooming in" on one or more of your goals?
Take, for example, being a good father. There's quite a lot of uncertainty in the broader community about exactly what that entails. One could spend a lot of time just figuring out what "be a good father" means. You may decide, as I have for myself, that being a good father means embarking on significant self-improvement efforts.
What abut minimizing the probability of those children, and everyone else's children, dyeing horribly, by working to reduce existential risk? What about making sure you can keep on being a father, and being rich, and so on by working towards immortality?
In general, if you're satisfied with what you have, work towards not losing it rather than getting more things.
LW ought to be looking at you as if you were a strange alien lifeform. What, you're not a university student not yet out in The Economy, or an underachiever whose life was derailed by sci-fi dreams, or working for an "existential risk" or "effective altruism" charity? Tell us more about this strange world of "family and a good job" that you inhabit!
You might consider the possibility that he is unusual not in being a person with a fairly ordinary life, a family, and a good job, but in talking about it here on LW.
(Data point: I have a fairly ordinary life, a family, and a good job. I don't talk about them much on LW; why should I?)
How about a Bucket List?