Discipline & Pleasure

Having more boring meetings, and a vision for a life lived along the way.

Princes’ Island, Istanbul, November 2024

Something I might have written about before but that has been coming up a lot for me in the last few weeks is this idea that we need to earn the right to live the life we think we deserve.

When we have done a lot of work on ourselves, we can wake up one day to realise that life is pretty good. Maybe you are sitting in traffic waiting for the bus to move when it occurs to you: the right opportunities are showing up in your life, you are surrounded by people you love and who love you back, and you are not really lacking in anything. You have a job you love, a home to return to, money for food, and friends to call.

What more could you want?

But if you are not careful, you can end up taking it all for granted. What once felt like peace begins to feel like boredom. What was once shiny and exciting begins to lose a little bit of its novelty. Maybe you got exactly what you wanted, and it's no longer so clear what the 'next thing' you should be striving for is.

We talk a lot about this in sobriety circles—that the lie many of us can tell ourselves is that we are finally done healing, and we can start drinking/using again. But it is precisely when you start getting complacent that relapse happens. It is not just the bad days we need to be wary of, it is also the good days.

I think this applies to most things. You just got promoted at work, that doesn't mean you won't be laid off. Your relationship is going well, that doesn't mean it can't come to an abrupt end.

This is not to say that all paths lead to loss or suffering, but to recognise that having is not the same as keeping. It is not the same as nurturing, building, and deepening.

Earlier this week, when I woke up on Monday to go to my first meeting with a client, I found myself feeling surprisingly heavy. I was a little bit tired, and in some ways still recovering from a string of activities that took place over the Christmas and New Year's break.

But if I'm being honest, I was really just feeling sleepy and lazy, and knew that if I asked to postpone this meeting, the other person would have readily agreed without making a big deal out of it.

In other words, I just didn't feel like getting out of bed, and in that moment it was easy to slip into a narrative that I had a lot going on, and that I needed a break. Because this is also somewhat true.

I currently lead community and partnerships work at a media company while continuing to juggle some co-founder responsibilities. I've taken on a fractional role at an investment platform that I'm really excited about, and I'm still running my coaching practice.

On the side, I mentor several individuals and am involved in a number of community initiatives, and I'm also working towards completing my professional certification in the Enneagram this year.

All this is on top of trying to be more intentional about staying in touch with people I care about, while also leaning into what I joked with some friends would be my 'year of dating aggressively' (lol).

So while I'm incredibly grateful for how my life looks like these days and feel very focused and excited for the year ahead, I'm also aware that all of this is ... a lot.

No one has forced me to do any of this, and at one point this was exactly what I wanted. Yet there I was, feeling like a victim in the life I had created for myself.

---

---

And so as I plodded through this week, I've found it necessary to remind myself what all of this is really for.

On one hand, I have been getting a clearer sense of where my life is headed. I previously shared about how at some point I see myself exploring opportunities outside of Singapore and maybe even starting a family, and more importantly wanting to be able to do all of this on my own terms. I want to live a full life while having the freedom and flexibility to do it my way.

On the other hand, I know that I'm not yet in that season. A big part of why I'm doing so much is because I'm still waiting to see what connects and emerges. I am very much still building the resources and leverage that would hopefully allow me to make the choices that are right for myself.

This means that I often find myself wrestling with this tension where I feel like things are great, but they're not moving fast enough. Sometimes I can feel like I really like where I am in the present moment, but at the back of my mind there is a voice whispering observations about how this is also kinda not quite where I eventually want to be.

I often joke that I make life incredibly difficult for myself, and these days I do genuinely say this in good humour. But there was a time when I often wondered why I couldn't just be happier with less—doing less, having less, being less.

A lot of this stemmed from wanting to fit in and to appear less different than others. Yet I've also learnt that if you try to suppress and minimise what is authentic and good about yourself, that part of you doesn't disappear. It simply finds another way out, and it can surface in ways that are not so pleasant.

Looking back on my mid-20s, I now recognise how so much of this manifested less as a genuine desire to be ambitious, and more as need to be seen as ambitious. And so I was always busy, always taking things on, always finding ways to make others reliant on me. It came from a place of needing to prove myself.

And the truth is that this phase of my life did not happen that long ago. As much as I now find it much more effortless to be ambitious about things that matter to me and that I enjoy (in and of themselves), this part of my personal history continues to cast its shadow over a lot of what I do. It is a shadow that shrinks a little bit more with each passing day, but nonetheless it is there.

Perhaps this is what I mean when I talk about that tension—to see that yes I may have once lived in ways that I now feel sad about, but also I have changed and am still changing and am moving in what I hope is a different and better direction.

To hold this tension is to hold both realities as true, and to not lean too much in either direction to be paralysed by guilt and victimhood or towards arrogance and the belief that I am done working on my baggage and am no longer capable of fucking up.

It is such a cliché to say that while it is important to work hard—at work, at our hobbies, at the things we care about, and at becoming better people—we musn't forget to have fun along the way. But I'm also realising that growing up is recognising that while we don't know everything, we also already know everything that we need to know. Clichés are just a cynic's characterisation of timeless and essential wisdom.

So here’s what I do know.

One day, my life in its current season will end, and I will step into something new. I hope it will be wonderful and that it will be exactly what I've been working so hard for. But it also means that I will look back on what once was, and I will miss it.

This is simply the natural cycle of things. I am not dreading it, I am just mindful that it will eventually come to pass.

Inspired by a friend who shared that she no longer sets annual goals, but instead chooses two words that will define her year, I decided that mine would be 'discipline' and 'pleasure'.

I am still figuring out exactly what this means for me, but I find myself saying more things like,

"I've already done a lot this week, it's time to stop."

"I'm comfortable with the journey I'm on, I don't need to fix everything today."

"I really want that to work out, but it's also totally okay if it doesn't."

And eventually, what got me out of bed on Monday morning was just remembering that if I want to do all the fun things that I'm excited about, I need to earn the right to do so.

Sometimes, this means accepting that I first need to have the boring meeting.

---

---

As always, if you want to support introspective long-form writing like mine, do consider upgrading your subscription.