Living forwards

Kierkegaard said something like we can only understand life backwards, but must live forwards. Things make sense only when you have already lived it, and you have a hindsight bias. It’s easier to find meaning.

I battle with this dichotomy myself. Looking back, it seems like everything I have done, pays off at some point. Even some random hobies, random events, books that I have picked off the shelf — they come to play a part. While living my life forwards, I don’t give meaning to those detours into chess, psychology, etch; but at some point I circle back, look at my library and find with a supprise that I have a book that I didn’t even remember buying, and that book is excactly what I was looking for.

Same with some hobbies. When I was young, I finally got myself a computer. It didn’t have internet or anything like that. Some old DOS system with few games on floppy disks. But What I found was QBasic, a programming language. And because I didn’t have much to do on that pc I started programming. Later I forgot about that, and started writing instead. I wanted to become a writer. Only when I was 26, got kicked out from university, not knowing what to do, my girlfriend applied for some jobs for me. One of them was a prgramming place. I got the home assignment, and started learning again. I got the job, because I was interested in the subject, I went head down into the subject material to know everything I had to know.

7 years later, I’m back at writing. All these night hours writing my short stories were not for nothing. I still can and love writing.

We are circling back to the things we already have done. And at some point, looking back you will start to see the patterns.