i cherish weekend mornings.

How quiet moments remind us to be more present and why we should listen.

6:30am on Saturday morning; time is moving slower, calmer, quieter.

There is a brief window when golden light peaks through the shadows and the day begins to warm after a night of rest. A faint chorus of birds are chirping in unison and the wind gently rustles through the tree leaves. These moments are captivating, grounding, liberating. Without realizing, you’re completely submerged and absorbed in the present — the “here” and the “now”.

No melancholic reflections of the past, no looming anxiety about the future. The brief but wonderful feeling of being present. 

This transitory state of repose offers a pause to allow your subconscious to momentarily reflect:

• What am I experiencing right now?

• What am I feeling right now?

• What do I want right now?

In the state of limbo between the end of a week and the start of the next, I cherish these idle moments. They’re a rare occurrence which I’ve learned to appreciate when time suddenly became a scarcity, and unabashed time to myself? A luxury.

When I can leave all forward thinking plans and all nostalgic reflections to acknowledge my current state of being, I’m gradually reminded how undervalued and under-appreciated the present is. The majority of my life was spent looking towards a marker in the distance and curating my decisions today in order to reach it:

• Where do I want to be in five years?

• Who do I want to be in five years?

• What do I want to have experienced/be experiencing then and how do I get there?

• This discomfort I’m feeling today is just a stepping stone to a better life tomorrow.

I can safely say that all long-term plans I once curated for myself have either ended in disappointment or they were a door that led to another. My mind would sometimes devolve into a loop of self-deprecation — I meticulously prepared and patiently waited for this. Why am I so disappointed or completely unready?

In actuality, that future “ideal reality” past-me curated wasn’t what I wanted when it was finally tangible. This was difficult to accept because I spent so long dreaming about and tirelessly planning towards these distant goals. On paper, these goals were both (externally) admirable and highly ambitious yet achievable if I worked hard enough. So, why wouldn’t I want that? 

Because life happens and people change, including their definitions of success, happiness, and fulfillment. How could I possibly account for the experiences and events that would occur between then and now? And how could I predict the way those experiences would impact my needs and wants years from now?

the one more traveled by

This is a natural habit ingrained in us since entering school. For the majority of “tech professionals”, our entire lives are acclimated to accept a safe path towards financial stability: go to school, go to college, pick a major, take a heinously underpaying (or unpaid) internship, achieve a salaried job with benefits, get married, have kids.

These paved steps are an easy segue into a “financially stable” and “admirably successful” life, but along the way you build a habit of thinking and planning for years into the future based on your arbitrary understanding and complacent acceptance that this is the “right” path. And okay, sure, maybe with a little spice of what you wanted based on who you were in that moment (e.g. Erica circa 2015 wanted to be a diplomat and thus majored in Political Science. Erica circa 2022 can now make jokes about how she’s done nothing with it since).¹

This planning is easy, natural, and flexible to follow until a certain point. Typically, the turning point begins during your first job. You did the schooling, you’re now earning a wage, and starting up your career. But what comes after? There are so many more unknowns that surface, with more pressure and less structure towards what the “right” decision is.² Instead, we instinctively replace that single academic path with two new paralleled paths:

1. Your career: you land an entry-level job, change jobs, continue climbing the corporate ladder, retire. At the crux of this, you’re deciding between an individual contributor or manager path. And then the ensuring pressure of feeling like you should be managing a team or you should have reached an L4 role by now. These conversations often look like a gathering of friends after not see each other for a few months, you hear murmured anecdotes of wanting to leave, but it is promotion season so maybe after they’re promoted. And the next time you see each other, everyone is promoted, but no one has quit.

2. Your overall “life” path: This is generally based around building a relationship, getting married, buying a home, and having kids. As I’ve settled into my late-twenties, I’ve heard this become a bigger and more frequent conversation topic with friends among my age. They often go like this: We’ve been together for 5 years and, you know, it could be better, but it’s fine. I do want kids by 31, so breaking up means having to date again and gosh my biological time-clock is ticking.

Following these defaulted “journeys to success” often come with the consequence of playing the toxic game of comparisons. When everyone else is also following the same path, you intentionally—or unintentionally—compare yourself to your peers. This means being stuck in a vicious cycle of either feeling like you’re failing because you’re falling behind or, even worse, feeling like you’re more successful because you’re further along. Both of these consequences are equally detrimental because it places weight on arbitrary successes measured by the completion of pre-ordained steps. However, this scale devalues the importance of how you’re experiencing these steps in the moment.

For example, I may be further along in my career than my peers but I absolutely hate my job and dread coming into work everyday. Is that still success? Or let’s say I’m single while all of my friends are engaged, but I’ve been able to focus my time on growing as a person and learning how to love myself. Am I less successful?

And yet, our fear of “falling behind” often comes at the cost of convincing ourselves that “sticking it out” is better than reevaluating if this is actually what we want.

a game of shadow tag

Chasing future aspirations can feel like chasing a shadow that holds the key to your happiness and success. Maybe, once you can finally reach it, it’ll somehow justify all of those hours, tears, and sleepless nights. But, I’ve found that rarely to be true.

When you build your life always looking ahead and always chasing, you often overlook if your desires and motivations are shifting. Rarely do we ever ask ourselves if this goal is still what we want or is it a scapegoat to justify our current discomforts rather than doing the hard thing and asking, “Maybe this isn’t what I actually want anymore?” We often shame ourselves for not achieving our goals, but maybe they weren’t the actual goals we should’ve set in the first place.

I’ve chased shadows and every time, it led to another.

• I wanted to become a data scientist and then progress to an ML Engineer, despite absolutely dreading statistics and all of the potential rabbit-hole theorems. I started a role where it was the next stepping stone in my career and quit shortly after.

• I once followed my partner across the country in hopes of reconciling our busy schedules and diverging paths. Our schedules were still busy, but maybe it’ll get better after residency. We broke up shortly after.

And in the end, I only had myself to blame because I knew how I felt in the moments leading up to those hard and painful decisions. I chose not to listen because maybe, in the end, it’ll all be worth it. Maybe once you achieve that manager title, you can finally spend time with your friends and family. Maybe if you follow this designated path in your industry, it’ll eventually rekindle some intrinsic passion that has since burned out. Maybe if you redirect the tensions in your relationship towards what could be a better life in the future, it wouldn’t be that you two are simply growing apart.

the value in hedonism

This year, I made a promise to be more present by intentionally acknowledging what I’m feeling and desiring right now. While I have a general sense of what I imagine my future to look like,³ I’ve put less weight and pressure on pursuing it. These are now loose guidelines rather than set-in-stone goals that will determine whether I am “successful” or not. 

When I started focusing more of my energy on the present, I replaced my list of long-term goals with long-form reflections on my experiences, specifically moments that have felt significant and meaningful. This practice made me realize how valuable these transitory feelings and experiences were. By intentionally acknowledging, reflecting on, and following these present moments and the feelings they gave me, I now have less anxieties around what my future may look like.⁴

Now when I listen to my friends, colleagues, peers, and mentees express uncertainty in decisions around their next career goal, I always ask what they enjoy doing right now. What gives them the most excitement? Forget all of the long-term planning, forget about whatever career path is “best recommended” for their industry and whatever optics behind their LinkedIn profile or rEsUme StOry. What gives them the most excitement right now? And what doesn’t? Lean into what feels good now and a path will create itself along the way.

For example:

1. You can follow a career path that leads you to hold an executive title. However, the years leading up to it were spent doing work you hated while pushing your passions aside in hopes that this title will give you some long-awaited achievement.

2. Alternatively, you can throw aside the career path you were once pursuing and switch jobs completely because you no longer enjoyed the work or industry that you were pursuing. However, you now have a job or lifestyle you love without the executive title or salary.

If we treat our lives like a treadmill with a carrot in front of us, we forget about the meaning and value behind the work we choose to do and the years we pay doing it. So when we replace the path from “education —> salaried jobs” with monotonous career paths or hopes to fix a star-crossed relationship, we do ourselves a great disservice by devaluing the beautifully ephemeral moments in front of us. And thus, we close the opportunities to the cascading experiences we could be having that would open new doors past-you couldn’t have imagined.

the story

The paths we follow are like stories we write for ourselves, which is an overwhelmingly open-ended thought. So when we predetermine the ending, it allows us to pre-fill the pages with predicted steps towards achieving “success”. There is safety and validity in following the most traveled paths that lead to a default dropdown list of options containing The Thing you will want. This is easier than blindly navigating and haphazardly filling in the pages as you go. However, the most exciting stories aren’t based on the endings but everything that happens in between.

I would argue that there is more long-term fulfillment in leaning into what feels good now, despite not knowing what it could lead to in the future. But even if the end result doesn’t lead to the fancy job title or the evergreen relationship you once hoped for, at least you know the time spent between then and now were filled with beautiful moments, lessons, and experiences that past-you would’ve overlooked out of desire for safety or fear of failure.

The next time you have a recluse moment, whether during the weekend morning golden hour or under the weekday midnight moon on a quiet street corner, take an intentional pause and ask yourself:

• What am I experiencing right now?

• What am I feeling right now?

• What do I want right now?

If it feels bad, leave it. If it feels good, pursue it.

We love hearing stories about protagonists following their hearts,⁵ but when we try to apply them to reality, we hand-wave the thought as childish and romanticized. But, I’d rather follow the path motivated by meaning that may lead to multiple dead ends than follow one that is motivated by safety and optics that lead to empty successes.

1. She also unintentionally minored in Italian Culture after a failed attempt at learning Arabic which was shortly eased after developing a hopeless crush on her ITAL100/200 professor, but this stays between us.

2. But if you do have people telling or pressuring you to choose a specific path, you might want to ask yourself: do I want to be living my life based on the decisions I allow other people to make for me?

3. I don’t have any long-term career goals in tech. My only long-term goal has been a personal dream since I was seven— owning a little cafe with some kids running around — which grounds me whenever I become too caught up in my current career in data. After all, we have to have something to vaguely daydream about on our balcony or else we’d be forced to listen to our neighbors blaring music on July 4th when there is really nothing to be proud of regarding the state of our current legislation system.

4. And this sometimes means not imagining my future at all. Because I now feel more in-tuned with my feelings and experiences, I’ve built more trust in myself, my instincts, and my resilience that Everything Will Work Out.

5. Or we yell at the screen, “C’mon the answer is so obvious!” Sometimes, I imagine an audience watching my life and I wonder if they would be frustrated that I was overlooking an answer right in front of me or yelling how obviously bad that idea is. I know, true Main Character Energy.