Planning for the future

    One of the biggest challenges we face in life is finding direction. You might say: "I want to be able to provide for my family", or similar, and that's a worthy goal. But that's not a direction as much as a symptom of the value society collectively agrees you deserve. Society largely determines your value from the direction you charter for your life and consequently the value you provide society.

What about our  direction? We decided to ask ourselves post-covid:
   Are our lives heading in the right direction?

Who do we want to see ourselves as in, say, 10 years?

These theoretical people - what does their daily life look like?

    And we had to evaluate if we were on track. This is always hard. Evaluating the path one is on requires introspection, consideration, and brutal honesty to resolve the dissonance we all accumulate over time. The answers to these questions could eventually be distilled into two options...

We could either:

• Change our goals.
   or
• Change our direction.

    We decided to change our direction. We're both still pretty young, want to pursue our careers, and want to make a difference in the world. At this point, that meant Seattle provided more opportunities for us collectively. Staying put in our Boulder home, in the same jobs, just felt like the complacent option. I kept remembering a favorite quote;

"If you don't build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs"

- Dhirubhai Ambani

    We decided to travel while we still have minimal responsibility to anyone else in our lives. My partner has lived in large cities; London, Toronto, Atlanta, ... in fact, when we met in Boulder, it was the smallest city she'd lived in and the largest city for me. Aside from a two-year stint in Houston as a child, I've lived in smaller towns across the U.S. This likely contributes greatly towards my penchant for being online, and computers in general.

    I suggested Seattle. It has a great culture we both enjoy, is still close to the outdoors, and has a strong job market for our professions. Within about a month of looking, she landed a great new job in Seattle, and a month later we're here in our new Seattle home!