May 01, 2026
It feels hard to get anything done. Not because it isn’t possible, but because too many things feel worth doing, so that doing anything feels like missing out on something important.
Off the top of my head, I can list at least two dozen things I’d like to do regularly and in the short term; goals, habits, and relationships I want to invest in. But doing almost any of them well requires giving up on a significant number of the others, and even just doing a few of them medium-well still uses up all the time there is, and that’s without factoring in the non-negotiables like work, chores, feeding myself, and so on.
Clearly, there’s no getting around the fact that there is an enormous amount of choice in the world. We can be anything and do anything. How do we feel good investing in one thing, knowing it means giving up on another?
This is why I’ve long loved the famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” It’s a pet peeve of mine that people continually misquote the end of that poem as a motivational example of individualism, which misses the whole point. It’s a poem about how life presents us with diverging paths, and as much as we’d like to explore both, we can only explore one, knowing we’ll never be back to explore the other.
If only it were as simple as two paths. Life does not present us with just two, but rather infinite paths. I want to be a jazz pianist, an author, an international traveler, a humanitarian worker, a lover, a husband, a father, a friend to many, a pro athlete, a pro gamer, a pro driver, a politician, a live dance music performer, a journalist, a baker, a business owner, a mechanic, a technician, a carpenter, a pilot, mountain biker, base jumper, skydiver, deep sea diver, philanthropist, polyglot, and so many other things. I haven’t even tried to be many of these, yet I’m already overwhelmed by the few paths I have explored.
I don’t want to dabble in a million hobbies, playing the part of the good consumer who spends his money on many different things because he cannot commit to any of them. But how can I feel good about giving up on so much? I certainly can’t delude myself into believing that I took the path less traveled by.
Then again, any path we choose is automatically less traveled by, because everyone’s path is his own, and therefore unique. I suppose there can be some comfort in that.