A Vision For Life

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I want in my life. For a long time I’ve really struggled to have a particularly convincing answer to this question, and have frequently not been able to do better than simply saying not this, which isn’t helpful to anyone. But I am slowly coming up with some things I really, truly want, an answer to the clichéd interview question “where do you see yourself in ten years time?” - a vision for my life.

I want to do a lot more travelling, and my bucket list of trips is growing. I want to do the Great American Road Trip, to see the sights and taste the delicacies of Japan and South Korea, I want to go ski mountaineering near the Arctic Circle in Norway. While London still retains plenty of its novelty that I’m not bored here and have no immediate desires to go elsewhere, the confidence I’ve gained here has reignited my desire to go adventuring.

One day I do of course want to settle down though, after I feel that I’ve slaked my wanderlust. I want somewhere I can truly call home, a place for me to always return to, that will always fill me with comfort. Not anywhere near the city, somewhere in nature, near the sea and hopefully near some trails. I want to have a big kitchen full of wholly unnecessary gadgets so I can try to recreate some of the magic I tasted on my travels, a record player and a cinema-grade sound system to enjoy the music I love so dearly, and a library filled with hundreds of books, old and new.

While all this does seem in many ways fantastical, I’m hopeful that if I set my sights on it, it’s all more than achievable. As a software engineer, good pay and high degrees of flexibility are some of the perks of the job. Remote work or part-time contracting could allow me to fulfill my travel-based aspirations, and if I work hard and keep making progress in my career then with some savvy investments and prudent budgeting I could achieve the financial stability in order to make my dream home a reality.

I think the missing piece of the puzzle is what exactly do I want work to look like - what kind of work do I want to do, what kind of product do I want to work on, do I want to be an individual contributor or a people manager etc. So that is my goal for the next couple of months; to try to answer some of those questions, so I can figure out how to leverage my job to get everything else I want out of life.

Oh and obviously I want to be covered in tattoos. Sorry Mum.