Today it’s Sunday, the 17^th of May - I slept 9 hours and 21 minutes with a sleep score of 88. I will consume 2200 calories as per my deficit plan and burn about 3500 as I am playing padel at 12:00. GPT is warning me that a +1K deficit is dangerous & might result in muscle loss, but we both know it’s fine as 1.) I will hit my 190 grams protein goal and 2.) My “accidental” 3700 cal. carb load yesterday will still balance out my week to exactly 2449 cal. intake. I am well on track with my calorie cut plan as I try to repeat my last summer’s best-shape-ever results.

I could have easily written the above paragraph with precise data about my monthly budgeting, running performance, investments allocation or phone screen time. All this information enables clarity – I choose better, correct my inputs when needed and progress a lot faster on the path towards my goals. Some of you already think this sounds dystopian, whilst others know exactly what I am talking about and probably wonder how their own tracking system compares to mine.

I agree with both of you. To the latter group, I am guessing we all share first-hand examples of goals achieved thanks to data & tracking systems that prove this just works. To the first – I don’t do this alone – I am enabled by technology that makes all of this possible with minimum friction. Our world is shaped by data instruments that close a self-feeding loop of questions & answers. On the individual level – we have sport watches, longevity bracelets & a ton of mobile apps; on the global level – we have the AI revolution that is rapidly transforming entire industries and sectors. In a way, our ever-evolving ability to structure & utilize data has become central. But if this is just a game of questions and answers, shouldn’t we be asking better questions?

What do we want out of life and what are we dreaming about? Are we on track to achieve it? Are we utilizing our most limited resource – time – on the right things, people and goals? How much of our daily chase and short-term objectives align with our long-term direction?

Do we even know our long-term direction?

There is no instrument for this. There are no dashboards, KPIs or scores that give us an easy answer to any of the above. In fact, there isn’t even a name for what I am trying to describe. Yet.

Let’s call it Life Trajectory Drift or just Drift in short.

Philip Zimbardo - one of the most renowned people who studied humanity & its relationship with time, halfway through his book writes almost in passing: “It would be so good if there’s a time planner like financial planners that answer the questions - what do you want out of life? How can you make your time matter?“. But then he moves on; he doesn’t build it. And despite the relevance & eternity of the topic, nobody has. We stick to our known ways of thinking about these questions as deeply individual & we accept there are no easy answers

But why do we conform to the notion of “it’s always been this way”, when we have such a rich library of historical anecdotes for the contrary? I’ll assume you know about Ford & the “faster horses”, Sony and the Walkman or iPhone vs Blackberry, so let me take you even further back.

Let’s travel to the year 1854 on Broad Street in London, England, where the local neighbourhood is burdened by a new cholera outbreak. The majority of the population believes that the cholera is caused by air pollution coming from the rotting soil of the river Thames. They believe in the miasma theory of Hippocrates – an ancient concept that originated 23 centuries before the outbreak. They would wear scented handkerchiefs, purify the air with perfumes & herbs, try and remove all ill smells & generally avoid places with stagnant air. About 600 people would die, before John Snow would successfully map out & track all diseased homes to a nearby contaminated water pump. He would successfully persuade the local authorities to have the pump’s handle removed & gradually the outbreak will be stopped.

Whilst Snow himself admits his theory was inconclusive back then, his act of mapping the disease around a single foul water source would become a foundational moment in modern epidemiology. It would help science explain & tackle cholera through the newly forming Germ Theory of Disease that would eventually undermine the miasma theory. Once he made the contamination clear, you could not see the epidemic the same way. It was never bad air, but germs that caused death. In that sense, John Snow’s work showed that data could save lives.

And what about us and our own lives today? Perhaps we have our own miasma theory – the clean email inbox, the money in our bank accounts, the next LinkedIn promotion announcement. Are we really thrilled about it or are we doing what everyone else is, because that’s the way to go? And even if we are indeed – do we know if this is really leading us towards the life we want?

We don’t have an instrument to guide us on this quest. And if we are to try & map it out like Snow, we might see why – unlike the cholera, our five-paragraph-old query cannot be answered by a single source of contamination. Perhaps because the answers will differ about 8.3 billion times or perhaps of its inherent complexity – we have tried to tackle it with perfume-like solutions.

The existing remedies include several adjacent categories of instruments such as productivity apps, planning journals or even therapy & life coaches. All these tools absorb a legitimate demand for a real human need but spend their bullets on the wrong target. Our technology has steered towards short-term, standardized, objective productivity tools or expensive personalized experiences enabled by questionable self-help gurus.

In addition, it’s hard to market and sell something that doesn’t even have a name and Drift just got its name 600 words ago. It’s easy to sell health (steps, calories, etc.) or productivity (planners, to-do lists, etc.), but how do you sell “Are you heading where you said you wanted?”. Every instrument needs the category to exist in ordinary language first – just as credit score has creditworthiness or calories nutrition. It’s hard to market & sell something that stays hidden and invisible. And it’s nearly impossible for an entrepreneur to have the incentives to build in a space that doesn’t have a market & quite frankly doesn’t really exist. Yet.

The famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung puts it very well – “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”. For most of our history as humans, the questions of direction and Drift were unconscious by default, and they really don’t have to be.

Our modern life doesn’t really help our current quest. Defined by ever-increasing demands for speed, uncertainty and change we are forced to think short-term. Why plan long-term if the world has gone mad? Our big tech friends don’t help us either – they comfortably satisfy our cravings for 30-second dopamine shots, whilst we willingly sell our data to their advertisers. Perhaps they know that long-term clarity is incompatible with short-form content that wastes us hours every day.

It is as if clarity sits on a tall mountain peak & we prefer to take a picture with it from a far, instead of climbing it and earning it ourselves. Currently it seems much harder to plan the next 5 or 10 years instead of planning out your next calendar week whilst staying blind if its168 hours would produce a meaningful piece in your own unique life puzzle. It shouldn’t have to be this way.

You can’t climb a mountain if you don’t know it exists. You can’t summit a peak without the proper tools for it. So, if Drift is a mountain with clarity at the top, our base camp would be this essay.

There’s a famous book by Bronnie Ware - a palliative care nurse who captured the top regrets of people at their deathbeds. Surprisingly or not, the top of the list did not comprise of taken actions or events. Instead, what people regretted most were: paths they didn’t take, opportunities they didn’t grab or people that they didn’t keep. Sooner or later, we will all be in their place. We would get the chance to see our life clearly – in one big trajectory line. But by the time this happens, it will be all too late for change.

And I don’t think we should wait or act blind about it. Just as we increasingly obsess and track our tiny daily details such as calories, steps or HRV, we should utilize our newly advanced data tech to help us ask better & smarter questions. Longevity is pointless if it just extends a life of running in circles. I know with confidence that many young, bright minds around me feel stuck and feel their potential is being wasted without knowing what to do about it. Maybe we should change our prompts & try to get unstuck from our short-term games & short-term prizes. We have the option to change how we think about this – by talking it out loud, instrumentalizing it and building the tools that will enable us to climb the clarity mountain.

Because unless you climb & see your Drift clearly - how would you know if you should keep going and accelerate or if you should slow down, take a turn, or change direction?

About 2000 years ago, in ancient Rome, a famous Stoic philosopher wrote an essay on one eternal topic: the finitude of human life. Two thousand years later, Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” is still as valid. His diagnosis still feels uncomfortably accurate – a life well spent can by no means be defined as short or not enough, it’s just that people find too many ways to waste it.

It’s quite remarkable that 2000 years later, despite our progress in such a great variety of domains, we still can’t properly articulate ourselves in relation to the one thing that defines us all: time. And whilst Seneca spots the problem with great precision & accuracy, our modern-day caveat is that his ancient prescriptions live in a world that no longer exists.

Let us first take a deep dive into what the ancient Stoic gets right to this day & imagine that we are his friend Paulinus, to whom he writes the essay:

“The problem, Paulinus, is not that we have a short life, but that we waste time”.

Seneca argues that people from all walks of life find ways to waste the majority of their lives as if they are not finite. We spend too much time on empty desires for pleasure & vanity, chasing approval, enslaving ourselves by serving other people’s interests or the worst according to Seneca - indulging in vices, being greedy or angry on meaningless matters.

It’s fascinating how much efforts & value we give to wealth & material possessions that can be lost & remade, but how “frivolous we are with the most valuable thing in the world, blind to its value because it is intangible, because it cannot be seen”.

We act immortal in our desires & aspirations, often postponing life & the things that truly matter to us. We don’t live for ourselves and we complain about it, as if it’s not us who take every path & decision. We lack agency for our time, and we justify this by blindly following the expectations of society.

Due to the variety of methods to misuse our time, we operate in a constant state of business, even if “it is universally agreed that no single worthwhile goal can be successfully pursued by a man who is occupied with many tasks”. A busy person can’t be the master of anything; the default mood of the busy man is misery. Our state of constant rush between the present and the future does not leave us with enough time to hear ourselves.

This is where Seneca starts to feed us his suggested remedies. A well-spent life is one full of meaning and our life isn’t short if we are to live with purpose. To obtain both, we need to save our time & protect it as our most precious asset. We need to study our own internal world, our unique values and drivers. If we successfully do this, we’d have enough time to achieve all our major personal accomplishments.

The Stoic recommends that we steer away from the ephemerality of the present & the uncertainty of the future. We need to retreat & put our focus on the only certain thing – the immortal knowledge of the past. We need to study the wisdom of the great people of history and make them our mentors - “you may dispute with Socrates, question Carneades, find equanimity with Epicurus”.

Unlike your present acquaintances & friends, the knowledge of the past cannot betray you - it will be your trusted guide on how to live well. He goes on further to suggest that this is where real agency lives – “you can’t choose your parents, but you can choose your mentors”.

But whilst Seneca’s essay validates its argument on the immortality of knowledge with its own soundness 2000 years later, his particular solution fails to escape the city walls of ancient Rome. Because unlike Paulinus, our present-day time & life challenges exist in a much more complex world.

Two millennia ago, the “withdraw and study” was a valid strategy that the ancient Romans could take. The world had significantly less distractions, limited career options and social comparison was restricted to your local community & peers. Most likely the wealthy Roman elite could retreat and study, whilst their slaves & subordinates continued to fulfil their basic human & social needs.

But how do you “withdraw” if you need to pay a mortgage? Or face any of the modern challenges that no human faced even a century ago? Seneca did not live in a world where an abundance of legitimate career & life trajectory options were widely accessible to everyone. Our unprecedented access to information technology allows us to compare with the entire world, not just our peers.

Every day we learn about a new successful person but blindly skip the fact that they dedicated a significant amount of time to achieve their current objective and most likely will have to spend a similar amount on their next one. Instead, our social feed is already showing us the next example, and the next, and then a few more…

This combination of optionality, social comparison and inability to withdraw creates a sense of speed & urgency that did not exist in ancient Rome. And the current AI revolution is only accelerating it - the term “decision paralysis” has surged 6x in the last five years in Google keyword searches. We are scared to decide, because the opportunity cost of not choosing the very best appears to be getting more & more expensive.

This is where the gap in Seneca’s work lives. “On the Shortness of Life” fails to answer the modern questions on time. How do we choose the right thing to spend time on? What should this thing actually be? Modern life requires achieving clarity while we are building it, not instead of it. We cannot pause and simply retreat into the past, because the present will leave us behind.

In a world where AI rapidly revolutionises full industries & sectors, withdrawal does not equal clarity, but stagnation and death. Our modern society requires constant movement and adaptation; one cannot simply withdraw or stop.

Thus, Seneca’s ancient wisdom gives us partial answers to a question that has been expanding in complexity. The stoic philosopher perfectly names the eternal human disease on time & meaning, but he cannot resolve the tensions he has never lived.

Today, clarity cannot come from withdrawal & the topic lives unanswered. Does it come from clear visibility into one’s trajectory and a fine balance between the ever-expanding demands for people’s attention & time? Is clarity even compatible with the speed of change & the modern structure of life?

We are living in the age of unlimited opportunity. Our access to abundance - of knowledge, information and technology - allows us to create our lives like no other time in history. Our modern society further validates this by glorifying independence, hustle culture and the popular idea that no achievement is impossible if you only work hard enough. And yet, on the individual level, we increasingly feel more anxious, lonely and sad. A rising number of people struggle to find meaning, doubt their self-worth or their life’s trajectory. A true paradox of modern time – our increased exposure to optionality makes us feel more lost. We try to combat this feeling with the urge to control – a false remedy that blindly steers us away from the deeper problem:

Our modern ideas about time & its management misunderstand the very notion of our finite, limited lives. The promise that we can regain power over our lives by doing more, mastering productivity & optimizing every second is false. Whilst fostered by the fact that it’s measurable and thus – visible, it pushes us to get more & more done in the hopes of finally feeling accomplished & enough. And yet we just feel more miserable. A giant rat race – we spin the wheel faster & faster, powered by our anxiety & fear that we are falling behind. Our constant comparison with the world enabled by hyper-information & the promise that nothing is impossible ensure that this race cannot be won by anyone. The more we strive for control over our time, the more loneliness and sadness we experience.

A strive for utopia.

A utopia that is counter-intuitive to the very notion of human happiness and meaning. A notion, whose recipe we already know to consist of one key ingredient – the quality and depth of our social relationships. People are social creatures – our physical health & emotional wellbeing are directly tied to how well we interact with each other. Yet, when we try to reign over our schedules, we become more and more distant. Your calendar does not like the fact that it can’t control the time of others, so it pushes you away. You replace connection with productivity & tie every hour’s worth to a ‘to do’ list. The more productive you are, the more you feel successful by all modern standards of society – your salary, career & status all tend to increase. The external validation game gets you hooked and you push yourself to achieve more. However, as you chase external rewards – your intrinsic meaning starts to slowly drift. The busier you get, the less time you have to reflect on whether your direction matches your inner drives and purpose. Your ability to tick off boxes earns you more & more boxes. And your efforts to optimize the very second of your time end up creating more noise, not more clarity. A vicious cycle: the better we manage our time, the more responsibility we are given, the less time we have to think about direction. In the attempt to master our time, it ends up mastering us.

This problem is further amplified by its invisibility. The meaning drift is silent and is only seen on a time scale that doesn’t fit our modern habits of speed and short-termism. Each productive week is defensible on its own – you see the products of your work and feel the sense of accomplishment. It genuinely feels good to produce and see your inputs turn to outputs. But over time, productivity does not answer the direction question. It’s one thing to see & understand your weekly calendar, but it’s completely different to be able to map towards what your time compounds and where your current path will bring you in five years. The speed with which our calendars & planners fill does not enable clarity. Especially when we consider that we don’t even see what we aren’t choosing - every yes is a thousand nos. But these nos are invisible - they don’t generate notifications and don’t send reminders. You see what you’re doing. You don’t see what you’re excluding. And before you know it – all the social validation & promotions you earn might drive you to a place you never desired. Often, by the time misalignment becomes visible, our optionality is already reduced – commitments & responsibilities are accumulated and therefore correction costs rise.

The real problem isn’t time management or our ability to execute. It’s the fact that we rarely stop to think about our trajectory and direction. Our relationship with time is transactional and we fail to understand its long-term complications in regard to our own dreams and aspirations. The popular culture around time management preaches various productivity techniques that can get an undisciplined person to finish a task or a project but fails to teach us how to specifically choose, follow & update a life direction that matches our unique values, desires and dreams. Productivity is visible and highly efficient in completing projects and to do lists. It justifies itself via its ability to be measured, analyzed and improved. On the contrary, trajectory is hard to measure – it depends on a variety of different factors, often immeasurable by the standards productivity has. Meeting a deadline or completing your to do list has direct feedback – you are doing well and it’s visible for everyone. So, you optimize for it – it comes naturally to optimize for the things you see & get rewarded for. What remains invisible is the vicious cycle discussed earlier – the more you optimize, the busier you are, the more you start to drift.

The modern world amplifies the above observations and adds several new layers of complexity. Whilst the core topic of direction and meaning is an eternal human problem from the days of Seneca, our present time poses challenges that we have never faced before. First – the unprecedented access to information & our tendency to constantly compare ourselves with the world make us question every choice & direction we are on. The world gives us unprecedented number of opportunities, yet we increasingly find it difficult to decide what to commit to. We enter a state of decision paralysis – the more options we get from the world & its technology – the more difficult it becomes to choose a path without regrets. Second – the development of AI & robotics mean that the productivity layer of optimization & efficiency will soon become commoditized. As execution & intelligence become cheap, the opportunity costs of a wrong trajectory become increasingly expensive. Direction and meaning become the bottleneck.

What is the solution to this key modern problem of humanity? This question’s complexity does not justify any single answer as a satisfactory end or conclusion. Our relationship with time is subjective and individual perceptions on meaning and direction do not conform with singularity on the matter. Furthermore, these concepts aren’t static – every new choice, experience or action interact together to create an infinite number of probabilities. Therefore, instead of a definite answer, we will once again return to the beginning – the tension between meaning, direction and our modern (mis)understanding of time. We optimize what we can measure. We drift from what we can’t. And by the time we notice, the cost of correction has already compounded. The question isn’t how to be more productive. It’s whether we’ll notice where we are headed before it’s too late to change course.