How Did I Get Here?

February 27, 2039

… how did I get here?

. . .

Mondays and Tuesdays I'm in meetings till 9. It hasn’t always been this bad, but since I got promoted to VP, the executive leadership calls and team meetings have started to take their toll. It’s not that I wish I worked less. I mean, I picked this career for a reason. I actually think the work we do is important. And I’m good at what I do, and that makes me happy. But 70 hour work weeks don’t afford me much time or energy for, well, much of anything else really. Which doesn’t seem that bad if you love your work …which I do….and it’s not that awful if you’re willing to concede that your work is your life …which, strangely, I sometimes can. It’s just become all of my life. And excited as I was am to do what I do, I just never imagined that it would take up so much space….

Wednesdays I'm done by 7. Which is perfect because I have tennis lessons on Wednesdays at 7:30. Oh yeah, I started taking tennis lessons. I played a lot in high school. A good amount in college. But after I moved to New York, I just never found time. Or maybe I never made time … Either way, I’m getting back at it now. I made it 3 weeks in a row until the client dinners started picking up. Wednesday just always seemed to work best. And it really isn’t all bad. Fancy restaurants. Great food. Good work being done. Just no tennis.

Saturdays are for family. Sundays are for rest. At least that’s what I tell myself. Family time is sacred, and seeing as I don’t have much time during the week, I’m good at making sure we keep it on the weekends. Every Saturday morning we cook breakfast together, and in the evenings, we’ll usually catch the latest movie or Broadway show. It’s only 3 of us. Which seems like just as much as we can handle right now. Rest has proved a more difficult goal to keep. New York City is built for a lot of things. Rest is not one of them. We chose to live here because of work, of course, and we both have good friends in the area and well, it’s New York, who wouldn’t want to be here. It’s just that all the energy can be hard to escape sometimes. Hadn’t really thought much about escape until I really needed it  …

I say “how did I get here?” as if  “here” isn’t a career that I love, good money, a family, and living in one of the greatest cities on earth.

“Here” is not a bad life. I’m just not sure it’s the life I want…

. . . 

In his book The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman explains the concept of affordances. An affordance is a way an object can be used. For example, a chair affords sitting. A cup affords lifting. Glass affords transparency (the ability to see through), but not permeability (the ability to walk through).

What an object affords depends on the individual with which it’s interacting. It’s a relationship. A chair affords sitting to almost everybody. But a very heavy chair only affords lifting to the very strong. 

A good designer keeps affordances in mind. A good designer understands how they want their products to be used and what affordances they want to make possible, and designs their product’s features accordingly.

This is best exemplified through a universally embarrassing experience in bad design: pulling a push door.

We’ve all been there: confidently and then aggressively pulling a push door until through some mix of trial and error or third party assistance, we find out that it’s meant to be pushed. Interestingly enough, a design feature found on most “push doors” - a handle.

A good push door designer will not put a handle on their door. When they do, and I pull the door, that’s not my fault. That’s bad design. A handle affords pulling. So I pull.

Good design is designing for user experience. A bad designer doesn’t think about how they ultimately want their product to be used and ends up building features that are not conducive to the user experience they desire.

So, similarly, when we design our lives with features  -  the careers we pick, the cities we live, the partners we choose - without considering how we, the most important user, want to experience life, what does that make us?

In the excerpt above, we have somebody who’s experiencing a life in line with the affordances of the features they’ve selected. Not a bad life, to be sure. Just a life that they don’t want.

A 70 hour work week doing something you love affords pride and accomplishment and, for many, genuine happiness and fulfillment. But it doesn’t easily afford feelings of freedom or time to spend with friends and family.

Living in a big city affords energy and excitement. But it doesn’t always afford peace. It doesn’t afford easy escapes where you can decompress and breathe.

And just like in the journal entry, we don’t often think about these things in the process of building our lives. It’s only until you wake up 5, 10, 15 years later to a life that has somehow caught you, of all people, by surprise that you think about the life experiences that you really do want. It’s only until we look around at the life we’ve built - good as it may be -  and wonder how we got “here”, that we realize we’ve been building with the wrong features.

…

This the second installment of what I am calling the patience series. A series of posts exploring the importance of taking time and effort to build meaningful things vs. opting for the quicker option.

A meaningful life is as meaningful a thing as can be built. And I don’t claim to say anything new. We all know the importance of thinking about the type of life we want. 

But how much of the life you want is imagined as features …

• Career

• Partner

• City

• Hobbies

• Income

 … and how much is imagined as experiences

• Peace and quiet

• Flexibility

• Daily time spent with friends and family

• Stability

• Predictability

I’ve found that it’s easy to build feature-first. Because we can just pick the jobs that make sense to our families. We can just move to the cities our friends move. We can search for the type of relationships that we see on social media.

Building this way doesn’t take much time or forethought. At its easiest, it’s just a matter of momentum and going along with the crowd. Until you keep moving with the crowd and suddenly wake up to a life you didn’t have much say in shaping.

Like any good designer though, I wonder what it looks like to start with experience and build backwards. To prioritize the experiences and pick the features that can make that experience a reality. It probably takes a bit longer. Requires more individual thinking. But when I look around at my life in 15 years and ask myself “how did I get here?”, at least I’ll know.

AT THE END OF THE DAY, YOU CAN STILL PUSH A DOOR WITH A HANDLE

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the importance of relinquishing the idea of complete control. We can’t see the end at the beginning. We can’t map out our lives step by step to a desired outcome.

When picking features and experiences for the lives that we want, we similarly can’t plan it out perfectly. We can build all the features that should bring peace and still experience anxiety. We can pick the right job and city and hobbies and still find that there’s simply not enough time to experience all that we want. And as if life wasn’t hard enough, what we want changes. The experiences I prioritize today may not be the ones I prioritize tomorrow.

I sometimes think about this and wonder if the better answer is to build and live feature first and then fight for the right experiences. Perhaps there’s no use in designing for the “right experience” because what creates the right experience and how I define the right experience change so often.

Could be.

But I also think there’s something to be said for taking the path of least resistance.

Sure, I can pick the features that are easy and look cool and then fight for the right experience within the confines of those features. I can build a handle on my push door and, after some trial and error, push it as intended.

Doing that though, I worry I’ll end up struggling to use my life in a way it was not built for. I’ll end up struggling to find time for myself and those I love in a greedy job. I’ll end up struggling to find quiet in a city that was built to be loud. I’ll end up struggling to find stability and predictability with people and things that were meant to be seasonal and ephemeral.

All good design is is building to make the desired user experience as intuitive as possible. I shouldn't have to don’t want to struggle and toil for the experiences that I want. Sure, all good things will require work and effort. But if I build with the right features, it should also be easy. I should be able to just wake up and step into the life I want to live.

. . .

We’re all heading somewhere. The lives we are to live we are now building. Intentionally or unintentionally. And just like our fictional journal entry above, we’ll all get to a point where we’ll ask how we got to the life we’re living. I want to have a good answer.