Make the Work the Reward - Elaborations on Living

To live life by intention instead of by default, you need to want it. I'm claiming that living by intention is desirable and superior to living by default—a claim that sits at the foundation of this entire essay. Without a deep understanding of what you want and intrinsic motivation (stemming from within/internal energy) to fuel your desire, you can't embark on the journey because you wouldn't even see it. But you don't need to want a specific thing. You just need to want transformation, exploration, or evolution—call it whatever you wish. You adopt the overarching mindset that drives how you live.

PS. Don't take this too seriously—ease up. There's a tendency (reminder for myself) to approach these concepts with the kind of effort that makes your eyebrows squinch. No need for that. Sincerity is required, seriousness isn't. The eyebrows get tired of squinting eventually, and there's no other way but to loosen up.

You aspire to become something—to be a certain kind of person, to develop traits that are unique and desirable to you. You'll draw inspiration from others because this is part of our social nature. You envision your upgraded self, and this clears the path for the journey ahead.

Aspiration is the destination you hold for your adventure—the hero's journey, your quest. The destination is necessary but not sufficient. It serves as a placeholder for a clear endpoint, but it doesn't matter much. The journey to the destination is all there is and all there ever will be. This isn't merely a proposition—it's a truth about human beings. Hedonic adaptation—the phenomenon of adapting to circumstances and seeking the next thing—is real and well-established across multiple domains of research (more on this later).

Like Marcus Flaminius Rufus in his search for the City of the Immortals, you fully commit to the process of discovery. The journey itself is the reward—each step naturally produces positive emotions, without the need for external rewards. This embodies a core principle of Flow State: the reward is the experience itself, not just the outcome. Dopamine is released throughout the process, not only at the end.

In Borges' story, Rufus is on a quest for the river of immortality and the City on its far shore.

Along the treacherous path, most abandon the mission. Exhausted and thirsty, Rufus spots a river, drinks from it, and loses consciousness. Days later, he wakes bound in a cave among mute troglodytes, who seem indifferent to whether he lives or dies.

When he finally reaches the City of the Immortals, he finds labyrinths, mazes, and stairways that lead nowhere—architecture “without purpose.” Awe turns to disillusionment and then to the sane desire to be mortal again.

The destination served only to reveal the deeper truth: upon arrival, a new direction appears, and the journey continues.

Aspirations and destinations are useful guideposts for setting the direction of the journey. They immediately become useless upon reaching the destination, as they are discarded for something new, a new destination, and a new adventure.

So, how do you define your destination? Here are two practical exercises for this: authoring your future by writing it down in detail (e.g., via the Future Authoring program), and monitoring your journey regularly to re-determine the path or adjust according to the current situation (e.g., yearly reviews, quarterly quests, weekly reviews).

Writing your future is a practice in crystallizing it, because writing requires thinking, and thinking requires some degree of effort, involvement, and engagement. This is desirable because visualizing with clarity what your future can look like, including multiple possible paths you may follow, makes the future real, tangible, and reachable. If you can visualize something and see yourself in that position, the chances that you reach that position increase drastically because your choices will align with it.

Consider how we constantly look to others for inspiration on what to do, what not to do, and what to become. We do this especially at a young age, when our experience is limited and we look to our parents, family members, and others around us for guidance on how to behave in the world. This is a natural part of evolution. Currently, the pool of people we can “look up to” is far expanded than it used to be before the Internet existed. We can peek into the lives of people from many parts of the world through YouTube videos, for example, and get a sense—though often flashy or distorted—of the possible ways of living available to us.

This is a powerful realization, because we are no longer constrained to the few people in our tribe as sources of inspiration, but can draw from virtually anyone in the world. One disadvantage of this phenomenon is that evolutionarily, this creates confusion and possible heightened indecisiveness about life choices, because there are so many options that it can feel overwhelming to make practical choices on how to behave, what to believe, where to live, what profession to pick, how to select a partner, and other common human decisions that would naturally flow without much distraction for the majority of people throughout history.

So, no wonder there is increasing isolation and a creeping disruption in how we behave and live, with many people moving out of their original town, not having children, not having a stable profession, and more. On the one hand, all of this fosters disconnection, lack of trust, and isolation. On the other hand, it represents a transformation, the birth of new possibilities that span far outside of the small world we used to live in, sometimes getting stuck in it.

These are some reasons why determining what we want is one of the most important things in our lives, and writing about it in detail is a stepping stone toward becoming who we wish to become, living how we want to live. There is a balance between exploration (research, observation) and exploitation (commitment, action). We can explore all the possible options, and then narrow them down and define how we wish to live. This is not a permanent decision. Everything always changes, and so do our aspirations. But it is a commitment to the process of figuring it out, even though there is nothing to figure out*, and living from the natural state of Being rather than from a place of overwhelm, fear, anxiety, and scarcity.