don't be the drunken sailor
on living intentionally, or what to do when everything's going fine but something still feels off.
Have you ever felt lost even though nothing is actually wrong? Studies going well, making friends, career has some direction — but there's this hollow feeling underneath. Like you're going through motions that someone else set up for you.
That was my first semester of masters in Germany. Everything was objectively fine and it felt empty. That feeling sent me searching — for what, I didn't know at first. Eventually I'd call it purpose. But before I got there, a lot had to crack open first.
the part you didn't choose
When you're a child, parents take care of things for you. Which school you go to, what food you eat, what festivals you celebrate. Not just parents — to some extent it's cultural. You acquire beliefs about how to deal with situations and people before you can question any of it. Society, parents, peers — they shape to a big degree what we call "ourselves."
We never truly ask ourselves when going to school — why this particular school or board of education? We trust our parents to make the right choice. That's fair. But there comes a time when you're capable of making decisions on your own, when you can actually think through the consequences of the choices you make and own them — that's what makes you really independent.
It's easy to move through life when decisions are being made for you that roughly align with what you want. I had to do undergrad like everybody in India — education is the thing your whole life supposedly depends on. I'd been into computers since secondary school so CS was a no brainer. I chose the university where I'd get the best shot at jobs in software, ended up in Bangalore. Yeah I had clarity. Most of us do to some extent. But it was narrow and highly influenced — I can't honestly tell you where my interest ended and society's expectations began. They overlapped just enough that I never had to question it.
Every party involved in shaping you has their own motives. None of them are necessarily bad actors — they're all looking for a win-win. Parents want a safe settled life for their children. The university wants to use your placement package as a hook for next year's batch. Supervisors want you writing research papers, showing you that the research path lies ahead. Everyone is thinking in their own terms and knowingly or unknowingly nudging you toward what serves them.
So who's looking out for you?
the question I couldn't answer
Toward the end of undergrad I got an internship. I was making enough to not burden the family and for the first time there was room to breathe, to think about things beyond career. Good times. Felt like I wanted more out of life than just money and good grades.
I was considering what to do next and masters was one of the options. My manager Bharat — more of a friend than a manager really — and I used to talk about it. One day he asked me straight: why do you want to do masters?
I started giving the usual answers. I need a degree. Really? Is it because your parents want it? Is it because you want to settle abroad? That last one wasn't even on my list, but Bharat had probably encountered enough people who go foreign just to settle and their aim isn't really education. For me it was a mix of things, and Bharat told me boldly — it's not worth it if you don't have a solid reason.
I was baffled. But he was right. I had no clarity about what I was going to do and why.
He told me something I still use: you have to ask yourself five whys. One layer at a time, each getting you closer to the real reason you're doing something. I took it to heart and started looking more seriously at my career. Found 80,000 Hours and their career planning workbook[1] — a document full of questions you answer for yourself about what you're good at, what your options are, what you actually want. What it did was force me to think about factors that were important to me and how to navigate them.
It was terrible. I mean that. It was like staring at a blank page trying to read something that wasn't there. Every question felt like an attack on my comfort. I didn't want to narrow down any part of myself — this desperate urge to keep every possibility open, to stay the person who could do it all. But somehow, painfully, I went through it. And the clarity I got was empowering.
My reasons for masters narrowed to three: I want to learn AI more fundamentally, I want to experience foreign education and the research environment, and I want to figure out my life.
Surprisingly, looking back at that document now — last edited December 2023 — I'm on one of the paths I wrote about. Physical AI. The spectrum of things I wanted was absurdly broad back then. Still is honestly, but it's narrowed in a way that feels right. I'm hoping to do the exercise again at some point. It's fun and rewarding — eventually you get used to asking yourself tough questions.
Then I landed in Germany, got settled, first semester went well — studies were fine, I was socialising, everything looked good on paper. But the question kept returning. What am I actually doing with my life? What happens after masters? Where is all of this heading?
I started exploring frameworks, asking myself questions every day for about 30 days. It's a very high-resistance task, confronting yourself with abstract questions about meaning and then trying to get to details and an execution plan. Demanding. But it was the start of building something I could actually stand on.[2]
I chose to live intentionally and be aware of where I'm heading. No one knows absolutes, but you can try and nudge yourself toward the life you want.
Why did I choose to do it that way? That's naturally how I think and feel about it. But if you're unsure, let me tell you a story.
the drunken sailor
Richard Hamming tells this in his lectures:[3]
It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about √n steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance √n. In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
You will probably object that if you try to get a vision now it is likely to be wrong — and my reply is from observation I have seen the accuracy of the vision matters less than you might suppose, getting anywhere is better than drifting, there are potentially many paths to greatness for you. No vision, not much of a future.
Hamming talks about an excellent career. I want to talk about an excellent life. Same mechanism, different domain.
When it comes to career you need understanding of the external world — science, engineering, how things are moving globally — and you analyse and figure out how to reach wherever you're aiming at. The subject of an excellent life on the other hand requires the ability to introspect, to understand your feelings and inner self deeply enough to figure out what makes you happy and what you're going to do about it. That's a different kind of work entirely.
And unlike a great career where you can think of something like a Nobel prize or having greater impact on society — an excellent life doesn't have an absolute optimal. It's not about having high or low standards. It's about having standards, values, and principles at all. It might sound counterintuitive, but yes — excellence can be subjective and you're the designer. Isn't that great? You don't have to worry about things you genuinely don't care about. Carve your own path.
One of the first things I read when I was still exploring whether having a purpose even makes sense was Hunter S. Thompson's letter to Hume Logan about finding your own current rather than floating in someone else's. It resonated — I was still figuring out what I believed, and here was someone articulating something I couldn't yet. Then I read his Wikipedia page. Shocked. Could not convince myself it was the same person. His version of an intentional life was journalism above everything — health, relationships, lifestyle, all bent around that one obsession. By anyone's measure of "balanced" it wasn't a balanced life at all. And that's exactly the point. He wasn't wrong. He designed a different life than I would. Two people both living intentionally can end up in completely different places — and neither has to be wrong about it.
finding what matters to you
There's no absolute recipe for your excellent life — you have to find it yourself. I'm merely trying to nudge you to be intentional about it and show how I approached things. Hopefully it nudges you to explore different frameworks or build your own.
Given my thoroughness and perfectionist mindset, I wanted to learn every framework that existed for leading a good life. I looked at a lot — Maslow's hierarchy, the Indian framework of artha, dharma, kama, moksha, Scott Young's Foundations, and more. I'd suggest exploring a few yourself and seeing what resonates, or build your own.
I ended up sticking with Lifebook which divides life into 12 areas — I find it comprehensive enough for what I want. What I liked about it was that it forced me to look at everything with equal seriousness, health, relationships, work, emotions, not just the areas I was already comfortable thinking about. And whenever I come across something useful from other frameworks I just map it into my areas. Scott Young's work on sleep, bits of ayurveda, whatever catches my eye — if it fits what I want for myself in a particular area, it goes in.
The specific framework matters less than having one. Pick something, stick with it, take what's good from everywhere else.
knowing isn't enough
After all this, what I've realised is actions are what actually matter. The GI Joe fallacy is real — even though you know what to do to get what you want in life, it's difficult to carry it into real life. I know this personally because I'm terrible at it.
Take sleep. I finished reading Why We Sleep. Very convinced, very excited about what I'd learned. Here's the thing though — all you really need to know about sleep is: get 7-8 hours on a regular schedule. That's it. That one piece of information will give you more benefit than reading five more books on sleep. And I still struggle to do it. The day I finished reading the book I slept at 4 AM — first time in months. I don't need more knowledge about sleep. I need to actually go to bed on time. Don't look for better information when what you have is already more than good enough — just do the small simple thing. Knowledge can guide you to the right actions but only actions make changes.
What's helped is making things stupidly small. Distill whatever you've figured out into tiny habits and weave them into rituals. I made it a ritual to read in bed before sleeping — no screens, just a book. I carry a book everywhere — bus to office, I pull it out. Or the laptop to write. This post is being written on a bus right now. That's not discipline, that's just what a ritual becomes when you make it small enough that it stops requiring willpower.
Whatever frameworks you end up using, make sure to distill things into small habits you can weave into your day. That's where life actually changes. Not in the knowing.
This isn't a rigid plan you set once and execute forever. It's something you come back to when things feel off. Do the things you believed still give your life meaning? Or did you learn something new and need to update? The vision can evolve. The commitment to having one shouldn't.
I'm still learning. Still figuring things out. Still staggering left and right honestly — but there's a pretty girl in one direction now, and the steps are adding up.
Last edited December 2023. Looking back at it, a lot of what I wrote has come to pass in ways I didn't expect. ↩︎
From Hamming's The Art of Doing Science and Engineering lectures. He was talking about vision for career — I've adapted the idea for life. The math is the same: random steps get you √n, directed steps get you n. Over a lifetime the difference is almost everything. ↩︎