in between days

Wondering whether I should actually do an elaborate plan for the next five years of my life. We're at that point at work where you set your goals for the next six months and evaluate progress against the ones you did last six months. See the thing about setting these goals, and making all these plans, especially the longterm five-year ones, is that you always go assuming that the current landscape will carry into the future. Even if you anticipate change, that anticipation is always based within the confines of what we've seen today, due that inherent inability we all have: none of us can predict the future. So what if the changes are so drastic they render all our plans worthless?

When we were growing up, there used to be all these people (teachers mostly) who'd imbue us with line after line after textbook line going something like "Failing to plan is planning to fail," or "Expect the best but plan for the worst," or my personal favorite "Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now." The general vein was always this: if you want to be successful, you must plan ahead. But no one ever went so far as to define what they meant by "ahead." Should you plan what you'll be doing tomorrow afternoon? Over the weekend? Next month? Or who you will be five years from now. See even when we were in school, despite choosing subjects and courses and stuff based on what we thought we wanted to become, I don't think we were really working towards a plan. We were just following the well-beaten path. Our lives were never abstract. You get born. Go to school, primary, secondary, uni (where there's a whole JAB whose job is to assign courses to people), and then look for a job. So now that part is over for me. The next part is a little more uncharted, and yes I do get a lot of advice and everything on what I should do next, but it's always something figurative like be the best you you can be.

And while there's obviously something to be said for planning, what about creativity? Innovation? Openness to opportunity, whatever it may be? "Great achievement has no roadmap." went someone on an episode of The West Wing. You'll be surprised how many things were invented as a by the way. Fleming discovered penicillin by accident when he was studying certain bacteria. Mozart and Franz Joseph Haydn didn't study the classics; they created them. A guy takes his dog out for a walk, notices blackjack stuck onto the dog's clothes and his trousers, takes a closer look, and out comes Velcro. All the way till gravity, and the Archimedes principle (all that guy had to do was take a bath - imagine that). These people did not go out looking for those opportunities. All they did was kept an open mind. And opened their eyes to the world around them. Why don't we live like that any more? It clearly worked for them. But not us, no. We all need to know where we're headed and how it'll benefit us, and we need to know it now.

Henry David Thoreau, having lived in seclusion for a bunch of years in order to discover the true meaning of life (as a sort of declaration of independence), came back and wrote that "... the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." It appears we've become enslaved by the processes we've created ourselves, and now we can't break free because it's become a vicious cycle. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," goes that Simple Plan song. If only we could just live one day to the next, and not feel guilty about it, and let discovery be an end to itself...

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