🧱When Designing A Great Life Makes It Worse

The worst part about designing a life you love is when it works.

Don't get me wrong. There's lots of things I love about the life I've created. Family and friends who would hop on a flight first notice of an emergency. An online creative business helping college freshmen grow their emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose through journaling. And hobbies like bludgeoning goblins in Balder's Gate 3 that help me rest.

No, the worst part about designing a life you love is what it quietly builds into your bones: the belief that you can control life.

Like a foundation that feels solid until the one block at the bottom starts to slide. Well, that bottom block is starting to slide.

It really dawned on me a few months ago. Two things happened at once. Firstly, I ended a friendship with one of my best friends of three years (the type of hard that comes only when you experience something funny, open your phone to send a text and oh...). Secondly, I began struggling with the work identity I was pulled toward for my full time job.

Suddenly, there wasn't the same pull toward staying in Ithaca, New York, the city I'd been in the last five years.

The Thought Started As A Trickle, Then Became A Downpour: I Have To Get Out. Now.

The feeling invaded every part of my body. I felt it in my calves while walking around Beebe Lake. I breathed it into my lungs. It clung to my subconscious as I drifted off to sleep, clouding my dreams.

My old design part kicked in. In just two weeks I hail married an entire move to The Netherlands. I'm talking creating a sublet, buying tickets, booking a hostel, setting up a masters program application, saying good bye to friends, calling family, and doing that thing where your identity starts making room for a whole new life. It was a sight to behold. If uprooting your existence were an Olympic sport, I'd have qualified for the Dutch national team.

My life design part was exuberant. My everything else part was not.

Once everything fell into place, I became frustrated at all the things I couldn't fully control. "God, can this flight come any later? Is my desktop computer really going to survive baggage control? What if I don't get into this masters program after already moving to The Netherlands? What if I forget how to say 'where is the bathroom' in Dutch and simply perish?"

I've trained myself to control life. But I haven't made myself vulnerable enough to flow with it. To flow with uncertainty, with things that suck, even when there are things I can control about it. I'm so good at designing life, I'm incredibly frustrated when I can't design the last 10%. This led me to a simple but terrifying question.

Why Am I So Scared Of Flowing With Life?

Can I be real with you? Flowing with life, I mean really flowing with it, scares the shit out of me.

Flowing with life. Hah! That's how you flow into a nine to five and neck pain, take out containers riddling the fridge. It's accepting defeat. Flowing with life reminds me of my past video game addicted self. The person more interested in maximizing their Terraria boss count then their real life skills.

But even more scary then my past, is the future person flowing could turn me into.

I have this recurring daydream. I'm in my late twenties, walking around a city block. The sun is setting sending melted ruby red across the horizon. But I can't appreciate it. I'm walking past a bookstore I would have wandered into three years ago without thinking. Now I glance at the window and keep moving. I play Slay the Spire 2 but more to zombify myself than appreciate the design. I read The Soul of Education but it doesn't touch my own soul.

I've stopped designing a life I love, and accepted one that's "tolerable," like a hermit crab who sticks to a shitty shell because, well, their shell is "nice."

The daydream feels realer than I'd like to admit. I'm only 22, but I feel ancient. So much has happened throughout my life... After 1,500+ journal entrees, every experience feels like it occurred yesterday and a thousand years ago simultaneously.

My relationships only promote this sense of age. When I came to Cornell University as a Freshman, I felt unwelcome. I was a spiritually hungry entrepreneur wearing a student costume. Every conversation about procrastination, or homework load, sent me deeper into alienation as I wanted to talk about how to write a great YouTube video hook, and navigating our shadows. Someone would say "Dude, this chem exam is going to kill me" and I'd respond with "Have you considered that your fear of failure might be an attachment to an identity you didn't choose?"

I found more resonance with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. They were more spiritual, wiser, more aspirational. Many of them are still my friends to this day. These people have already gone through their grinding life design teens. Each word they speak carries the weight of countless regrets and half turns, but also profound gratitude and love. You can see it in the way they hold a coffee mug with both hands, or how they let a silence sit for five seconds longer than anyone under 30 would dare.

One thing emanates through all their beings: Flow.

They're less controlling of life. They accept things as they come and go. They have a calmer, profoundly tranquil reserve, and yet many of them are still quiet active in life's events.

I so aspire to have this same relationship with life, but as a 22 year old it seems like surrender. It seems like a surrendering of caring as much, of working really hard to make my visions real, or making life the fullest it can be. As I come to Hamilton to visit my parents and brother the week before my flight, I'm spending many days walking and sitting with this thought.

Does Flow Have To Mean Surrender?

For months I held flow and design on opposite sides of a boxing ring. In one corner: the life architect, blueprint in hand, who hail-maried a move to The Netherlands in two weeks flat. In the other: some barefoot monk figure who accepts whatever life throws at him and calls it sacred.

I was terrified that stepping toward flow meant stepping away from everything I'd built.

But sitting with this fear long enough, I started to see the frame was broken. Ironically, I felt this insight the most while packing for The Netherlands. As I sat in front of my suitcase, I raised each potential thing I could bring up like I was accusing it at a trial. Did this item hold enough significance in who I am to make the cut?

My Alienware desktop computer, with all my childhood video games, editing software, and Balder's Gate 3. This held my high school friend group together more than I’d like to admit. That's got to come. My five pound brass Thinker Statue Beatrice. It watched my loneliness after losing two friend groups Freshman year. Every time I look at it I'm reminded of one of my mentors, Marcus Aurelius. But it can't come. It's over five pounds. My Dungeons & Dragons die set. The die I used during my six month Chrono Files campaign with my ex. A set that reminds me of acting, and world building, and creative expression. That's coming.

I'm a minimalist so I don't have much stuff. That made every item I questioned doubly as difficult to let go of. Each thing I left was a punch to the gut.

Afterward I had a conversation with my experience moving with my family and some friends I'm building at Essential Capacities, a community I continue to deepen my love for. I realized, I'm not abandoning the zestful, action oriented, identity I built in the last six years.

Even with all the things I'm leaving behind, I'm bringing the most important thing to the Netherlands: my self.

My self holds all the ways it's grown from my past possessions, relationships, and experiences. The connections I've built here can continue to grow, online. I'm not abandoning my past self, I'm growing in a different way.

Flow Doesn't Ask Us To Stop Building. It Asks Us To Stop Building Against Life.

A river helped me see it differently. We talk about flowing with life's river, but we forget that rivers aren't formless. They have banks. They have direction. Depth in some stretches, shallows in others. Without banks, water doesn't flow. It floods.

My banks are my values. My vision to make the college system more knowledgeable, loving, and conscious. The hunger to create, connect, and educate that has been with me since before I could name it. These don't dissolve in flow. They're what makes flow possible.

Perhaps flow isn't the absence of design. It's design so deeply embanked you can navigate without conscious monitoring.

And this insight is what illuminated what I'm really scared of. It's not losing my drive. It's losing my banks inside the current.

If I relax my grip, will I be able to tell the difference between flowing toward truth and just drifting? But here's what I keep forgetting: I've written over 1,500 journal entries. I've mapped my own shadow archetypes by name. I can feel in my body when something resonates and when it doesn't, down to specific muscles in my chest and throat. That discernment isn't stored in my grip. It's stored in me. Loosening one doesn't erase the other.

The transition I'm in, from Cosmic Weaver to Cosmic Systematist in my own framework, asks me to stop treating my structures as the ground I stand on and start seeing them as lenses I hold. I can still pick them up. I can still build with them. But I can also set them down at night without feeling like the floor disappeared.

To be clear, for most of my audience, I think designing life is the stage you should be in right now. I call this the Cosmic Weaver stage. But there comes a point at which your designs start constraining you from the higher self you need to become. That's where I'm at.

I think the people I admire most, those friends in their 40s and 50s with that quiet reserve, didn't get there by giving up. They got there by learning to design with life's frames instead of against them. They became surfers instead of dam builders. They're not flowing alone. They never were. They've built relational banks that help them navigate.

I'm 22. I haven't earned that ease yet. But maybe earning it doesn't look like more control. Maybe it looks like trusting, finally, that the banks I've built will hold.

And perhaps, even those banks will erode into new ones. I don't know. And I'm incapable of controlling life to ensure it doesn't happen. But I think I'm starting to become more okay with that. Ask me again after I find out if my desktop survived baggage control.

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