Open Thread: How much strategic thinking have you done recently?

My problem is that I have basically run out of life goals. My goals used to be:

1. Get rich
2. Get married
3. Have children + be a good father

I did 2 a number of years ago. 3 is ongoing though I've made it past the hump of actually having 1 child, and so far consensus is that I am being a good father. I'm not rich yet but progress on that is also steady and I've made it past the major hurdles such that if I continue on the path I am on I'll be rich in a few years. I've already been "high income" for awhile and that is much like being rich except a bit more stressful.

Unless life throws me a curve ball I don't have much uncertainty about achieving my major goals. I just have to keep doing what I am doing. It's unbearably boring! So now my new goal is to figure out how to actually get excited about something again without interfering with the ongoing achievement of my previous goals. So far I haven't made much progress. Any thoughts?

1. No, but it's only because I think figuring out what my goals are requires solving normative ethics which seems too hard a problem to tackle directly.
2. So my interim long-term goal is to eventually figure out what my actual goals are and achieve them (if it's not a null set) and since that seems most likely to happen if we get a positive Singularity, my medium-term goal is to push the future in that direction.
3. My current big problem is that among people who share my medium-term goal of pushing for a positive Singularity, many don't seem to share my ideas of how best to do it. (Eliezer wants to work on FAI, Holden and Christiano want to generally increase prosperity and empower people, and both of these things seem counterproductive to me.) My current way of trying to solve this problem is to write LW posts to explain my arguments in the hope of resolving the disagreements.
4. Lack of feedback is a big problem for me and I worry a lot about whether I'm being productive or counterproductive towards my goals. Unfortunately I can't think of any systems that I could create to help with this. (ETA: I did write this post in the hope that LWers can help spot when I'm going off track and help correct my course, but so far nobody has taken up the offer.)

Yes, No, Yes, No.

And the more I think about it the more confused I am.

Edit: To be more verbose, I think a lot about what my life goals are. Certainly humans had this question for thousands of years when they lived in affluence, but not when more immediate needs were to be filled like food or security. The most common thread seems to be to fulfil the will of a higher being or some measure of personal happiness. I find the latter more attractive, though both options just push the question further: What is the will of this being and what makes me happy? I do not have a good answer, as basic exercise, socializing and such do provide pleasure but not much long-term happiness to me. It seems that my beliefs are somehow miscalibrated in such a way that I am not able to derive long-term happiness from living in this admittedly amazing world full of wonderful people, amazing technology and unreal order. For this I am looking into CBT and Stoicism. Which again just pushes the question a bit farther. What should I strive for? With enough effort I am surely able to derive joy from anything without putting in much further work. Then again, this does not have to be a bad thing.

As I said, the more I think about it, the more confused I am. Stoicism seems to be the closest thing to an answer, though not close to something like a scientifically supported answer.

Just did this last night, actually. I've been noticing that my major goals, i.e. both professional and research goals have been playing host to a number of other side projects, like: learn this new language, write this cool script, start learning the latest trendy math field.

What I ended up doing is allocating 6 hours to my side projects on the weekends, promising to myself that I will use time-tracking, and once 6 hours is filled, spread over whichever projects, then I will not spend any more time on them.

Regarding annoyances, I simply wrote down everything that was annoying me, came up with solutions, wrote the solutions (and deadlines) in my planner, and then I was able to cross them off the list. Once I really got going, my days seemed to become a lot simpler, just because I could see has been bothering and distracting me.

Long term goals were still good. I had effectively been suffering feature creep for a while, and for now I can work much more efficiently.

I often find that the hardest part is finding the answer to:

Do you know what your long-term and medium-term goals are?

I honestly have no idea. I can easily focus on short term goals, when I am rather confident that Me(now) will be very similar to Me(goal reached). Things get harder and blurrier when I have to take into account my most likely self modification. Concrete example. Since I was 10, I've always wanted to be a physicist. Roughly near the end of my Ph.D. I started to evolve into someone who doesn't want to be a phisicist. I tried a short post-doc abroad and looked for a different job. If I had known in advance I could have spared me at least a couple unpleasant months abroad and a couple (make it 3) of years of underpaid work. But I didn't know. Now I find myself wanting to make a lot more money, but I keep wondering what will happen if this desire faded away abruptly and I finded myself trapped in an awful job.

Lots!

Related, from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner: The Importance of Scheduling Nothing.

Right now?

Well, let's see. My basic needs are met (and then some), I have long-term goals for work (on track) and medium-term goals for personal development (getting there)...

My long-term personal goals are fundamentally impossible without intelligence enhancement. This, to be honest, makes the question a little hard to answer.

The thing is, I haven't thought about this as formally as you're suggesting I should; I've barely thought about it at all. Doing what I usually do seems to automatically get me moving in the direction I want.

If you're facing big problems or annoyances, have you thought of ways of solving them?

That depends on what level of thinking you mean. Nearly everyone thinks in some ways about solving some big problems that he has.

• yes. I tend to reevaluate goals frequently (at least weekly)

• yes to the extent of future uncertainty. I am free to change my goals at any point, after all.

• yes... (obviously?) I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone could not do that.

• if you would call it "a system", I try to restate nearest action that brings me closer to achieving my goal every day. More often than not the action is "wait" (until you acquire enough money/power/influence to make something happen, until you have enough information to make a decision, etc...)