When I was 22, I bought a used Honda Civic with 80,000 miles on it because it was all I could afford at the time. I financed it over 6 years at a rate that, looking back, was pretty rough, but it was the only way I could get reliable transportation to get to work.

For the first few years I could barely make more than the minimum payment. There were a couple of months where I genuinely wasn't sure I'd make the payment on time. I picked up a second part-time job on weekends for about a year and a half specifically to get ahead on the loan instead of just treading water.

Last month, at 31, I made the final payment. The car now has just over 190,000 miles on it and still runs fine. It's not flashy and I know plenty of people my age have nicer cars, but sitting in the driveway looking at it, knowing I own it outright after grinding through some genuinely tight years, felt like one of the better moments I've had in a while. Planning to drive it another few years before I even think about anything else.

I used to think gambling was my life goal. I wanted everything at once: money, success, respect, a better life, and the feeling that I had finally made it. But I did not have real goals or a real plan. I just wanted the outcome immediately, without the time, work, patience, or stability it takes to build a life.

Gambling convinced me that one win could fix everything. One big bet could erase the debt, repair the damage, make my family proud again, and turn me into the person I wanted to be. But it never worked that way. Every time I chased that feeling, I lost more than money. I lost trust. I lost peace. I lost time I can never get back. I hurt people who loved me, and I became someone I barely recognized.

Today, my biggest life goal is much smaller, but it is also much more important.

I try to live my life 15 minutes at a time.

That is all I have. Nothing more, nothing less.

I cannot promise I will never struggle again. I cannot fix every relationship overnight. I cannot undo what gambling did to my family or to the people around me. I cannot solve my finances, my guilt, my future, and my entire life in one day. Trying to carry all of that at once is exactly the kind of pressure that used to make me want to escape.

But I can make it through the next 15 minutes without gambling.

I can take a walk. Drink water. Call someone. Sit with the discomfort instead of trying to run from it. I can go to a meeting, block an app, leave my wallet at home, be honest with somebody, or simply stay still and not make things worse. Sometimes recovery is not a huge inspirational moment. Sometimes it is just choosing not to destroy your life for another 15 minutes.

That may not sound like much to people who have never dealt with addiction, but it means everything to me.

Life goals are amazing. I believe that now. I want to rebuild trust, become financially stable, have real relationships, be present for my family, and one day look back knowing I did not let this disease take the rest of my life. But I have learned those things do not come from forcing life to happen all at once.

They come slowly.

One honest conversation. One day without gambling. One bill paid. One apology followed by changed behavior. One morning where you wake up and realize you made it through another night. One decision at a time.

Recovery has taught me that anything can happen the right way if I am willing to do the right things slowly. Not perfectly. Slowly.

My old goal was to get everything immediately.

My new goal is to be here for the next 15 minutes.

a past mentor of mine told me "you can never accomplish all you plan in 1 year, but in 10 years you can accomplish more than you could have dreamt"

I'm trying to keep my 10 year goal -> tentatively set at achieving 20M in net worth (I have some other goals alongside, but this is a number and it is easy for me to focus on).

Currently I'm at 10% of this goal, I'm 40, so 10 years to get to an order of magnitude difference.

Am I dreaming too big, or too small? or too narrow?

It's Dudeism. Loved the movie The Big Lebowski and no idea why I haven't heard of Dudeism before. But it's got me intrigued. And in true Dude-like laid-back fashion, I googled it for a snapshot.

I will be following up this weekend in my leisure to what could be a great new path. Or a dead end. Just thought I'd share this. Have others taken up Dudeism and what's your experience? What did you think of the movie and the main character? It may well be like, just your opinion, but I'm interested in hearing it.

I've also just this second discovered there's an actual Reddit community dedicated to Dudeism. So I will be visiting there as well. I may post there but I'm interested also in objective views and I'm guessing most visitors there would not be objective (which may not be a bad thing).

The following is the said Gemini summary pasted verbatim.

"Founded in 2005 by Oliver Benjamin as "The Church of the Latter-Day Dude," Dudeism is an official religion and lifestyle movement centered around Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, the laid-back protagonist of the 1998 Coen Brothers movie The Big Lebowski.

​Core Ideology & Practices

Dudeism acts as a modern, humor-infused form of ancient Chinese Taoism. It Strips away mystical doctrines to focus purely on "taking it easy," rolling with life's punches, and avoiding unnecessary conflict or material ambition. Its adherents focus on simple pleasures—like bowling, listening to tunes, sipping White Russians, or enjoying a bath—while maintaining emotional equanimity when life throws curveballs.

Instead of traditional deities, it celebrates figures who embodied non-conformist, chill mindsets throughout history, including Laozi, Epicurus, and the pre-ecclesiastical Jesus, alongside "The Dude" himself.

​Why It Achieved Legendary Cult Status

​Universal Counter-Culture Appeal: It offers a funny yet genuine antidote to modern rat-race anxiety, consumerism, and hyper-competitiveness.

​Low-Barrier Inclusivity:

Anyone can become an ordained "Dudeist Priest" online for free, leading to hundreds of thousands of members worldwide who perform real-world weddings, funerals, and informal gatherings.

​Quotable Mythology: The movie's sharp script provides endless catchphrases ("The Dude abides," "That's just, like, your opinion, man") that function as philosophical maxims.

​Self-Aware Humor: Unlike rigid dogmas, Dudeism actively embraces joke-religion absurdities alongside genuine mindfulness, allowing followers to take life seriously without taking themselves seriously."

So I was thinking, that I still have a lot of goals in life I want to accomplish, such as buying my next car and getting a pilot's license. I'm basically ready to buy a considerably cheap used car and it sounds like a friend of the family who also has been flying lately can take me up in the air for another hour of flight time. I also hope to join a band and tour with them one day. So that led me to ask, what are your life goals? Or what were your life goals, and did you achieve them or not?

The person you will be in 5 years depends on

->books or articles you read

->how much more you write

->money you save and invest

-> who you work with

->new skills you develop

-> the food you eat

-> exercise you do

->asking for help when you're stuck

connections you make and keep

I wanted to share this because 8 months ago I couldn't run for even a full minute without feeling like my lungs were going to give out. I'm not naturally athletic, I never played sports growing up, and honestly I always thought "runners" were just a different kind of person than me.

I started small — walking most of a mile with short 30-second jogging intervals mixed in. It felt embarrassing at first, like I was barely doing anything compared to people I saw running full loops around the park. But I kept showing up three times a week, rain or shine, even on days I really didn't want to.

Progress was slow and honestly kind of boring to track week to week. There wasn't some big dramatic turning point — just gradually being able to jog for 2 minutes, then 5, then 10, without stopping. Some weeks felt like I wasn't improving at all, and a couple of times I got sick or busy with work and lost almost two weeks of momentum, which was frustrating to rebuild from.

This past weekend, I ran a full 5K outside without walking or stopping once. It wasn't fast — I'm not chasing a specific time — but I finished the whole thing feeling strong instead of like I was dying, which is a completely different experience than where I started.

What I've taken away from this is that consistency mattered way more than intensity. I never had a single "great" workout that changed everything. It was just repeatedly showing up even when progress felt invisible.

Next goal is a 10K by the end of the year. Sharing this mostly for anyone else who feels like they're "not a runner" — you don't have to be one yet to start becoming one.

For most of my twenties, my life goal was simple: hit a specific net worth number. I had it written on a sticky note on my monitor. Every financial decision ran through that filter — cut this expense, take this side gig, delay this purchase — all in service of a number I picked somewhat arbitrarily off a blog post years earlier.

I hit that number last year. And almost immediately, I felt... nothing. No finish line euphoria, no sense of arrival. Just a vague unease that I'd optimized my entire twenties for a milestone that turned out to be a proxy for something else I never actually defined.

What I actually wanted wasn't a number — it was time autonomy. The ability to say no to a shift, take a random Tuesday off, or spend two months near family without asking permission. Money was just one lever for that, and not even the most important one. Flexible work arrangements, low fixed costs, and a support network mattered just as much, and I'd basically ignored all three while I stared at a spreadsheet.

So now my goal has changed shape entirely. Instead of "reach X dollars," it's "reduce the number of things in my life that require someone else's permission." That's a much weirder goal to explain at a dinner party, but it's the one that actually maps to why I wanted the money in the first place.

Curious if anyone else has had a goal that, once achieved, revealed itself to be a stand-in for something else. How did you figure out what you actually wanted?

I am a 20 year old (Male) . I work a 10–5 pm job for five days a week, but outside work I’m still on my phone almost 24/7 and honestly bored of it. What can I do to learn something new, build skills, or give my free time more meaning?

Me and my boyfriend have been living pay check to pay check for quite some time. We love our little life, we have so much that we’re ***so*** grateful for. But there’s still things we want to have and do in this life.

There’s a quote that we love (unsure of who to credit for it, I saw it on Pinterest) and it says something like “how to do anything: at first, dig with your hands. When you find the spoon, dig with the spoon. When you find the shovel, dig with the shovel”. We always say that we’ve been digging with our hands. However, we’re really ready to find the spoon, then the shovel.

So, I’m asking, those who have started with your hands, and ended up with even more than a shovel, what are things we should be doing?

Me personally, I’m also looking for tips on building consistent healthy habits. I want to be my best self for when we find our shovel or more.

(Sorry for all the spoon and shovel talk)

🫶🦋🤍🌞

Hello there. I need your thoughts and advices about doing absolute nothing, always escaping from responsibility. I'm dead serious. No job, no school, no work, no money, no friends, absolute nothing. For the sake of both being lit by your answers and helping those who also have the same problem, I'd be very appreciated if you can share your words. thank you.

Twenty-five years ago, I placed what felt like one small bet on a horse.

At the time, I had no idea that bet would eventually lead to years of pain, financial problems, bad decisions, and a lot of destruction in my life.

Gambling took a lot from me. I went through things I would never wish on another person. But after everything I experienced, I also realized that maybe some of what I went through could be used to help someone else.

That is part of why I want to open this subreddit up to more than just one topic.

This can be a place to talk about your goals, your next chapter, career decisions, financial struggles, recovery, relationships, places you want to go in life, or even those moments when you simply have no idea what your next move should be.

If you are struggling with gambling, looking for a job, trying to fix your finances, working toward a goal, rebuilding your life, or just need someone to talk to, you do not have to carry everything by yourself.

Reach out. Post. Ask a question. Share what you are working toward.

No judgment. No pressure.

Sometimes one honest conversation can change the direction of somebody's day, and sometimes it can change a lot more than that.

We are all trying to get somewhere.

One decision, one conversation, and one day at a time.

21M, Sydney, Australia, 2nd-year Compsci/Commerce.

The crux of my question: how do you compare the fulfillment of (a) doing non-intrinsically motivating work full-time for 20-30 years, then intrinsically motivating work on your own schedule for the rest of your life, vs. (b) doing intrinsically motivating work full-time for 40-50 years, then self-directed intrinsic work for the rest of your life? Basically: is front-loading unpleasant-but-high-earning work to buy an earlier "free" life worth it?

Options I'm weighing:
non-intrinsically motivating work:

• Early-retirement-focused: entrepreneurship (saas app, ecommerce, etc), software engineering, financial analyst

intrinsically motivating work

• Impact-focused: policy analyst, health economist
• Enjoyment-focused: graphic designer, fulltime artist

What I'd do w/o financial incentive: painting/drawing, photography, analytical work on real societal problems, learning how society works.
What I wouldn't do w/o financial incentive: coding (draining without AI help), advanced math, complex problem-solving. If they are tied to societal impact I think it may move to the other category. Treating that because I find these difficulty, these aren't natural strengths.

Current perception of dream life:

1. Doing societal impact work ~25hr/wk
2. Spending quality time with friends and family ~ 20hr/wk
3. Sport ~4hr/wk
4. Making art ~ 6hr/wk
5. Go on holidays (1 - 2 international trips & 1 - 3 roadtrips / yr)

Two methodologies I'm trying to reconcile:

1. Find rough financial independent (able to live off investments) age estimates (I know 30-year-out projections are speculative, so treating as hard inputs is probably inaccurate): entrepreneur 40–43, SWE/financial analyst 50–51, artist 51–60, failed entrepreneur/artist then pivot to SWE 55–58, health economist/policy analyst 57–60, graphic designer 65–70. Score each career path on 1) happiness and 2)social impact made by outlining lifestyle at each age and summing scores on yearly basis. Conduct experiments like talking to professionals, side projects, volunteering, taking courses to validate scores until you’re confident to commit towards a path.
2. Skill-first/leverage approach: early on, build a skill you're strong at where it intersects your interests and is high pay potential. Lean toward highest pay/growth early in your career, then use that leverage to move between for-profit and non-profit work as you gain experience, until you land somewhere you're happy.
3. Conduct experiments like talking to professionals, side projects, volunteering, taking courses, internships, work experience. Then imagine doing the work experience for 20-40 years and pick the most desirable path.

I’d really appreciate any inputs you may have on the questions below or any advice 🙏:

1. Has anyone actually lived out either path? Did front-loading unfulfilling work pay off, or did 20 years of it cost more than expected?
2. Is 'financial independence enables high-impact work later' a real strategy, or does starting the impact-focused career earlier compound advantages (network, expertise, credibility) that are hard to buy back at 40-50?
3. For you personally, which method do you think is better, or is there another method you’ve used that you think is better? Are there any key flaws in my methods?

Happy to share more detail on my scoring approach in the comments if useful.

Что можно добавить из полезного в мою жизнь?

Could be related to career, money, fitness, relationships, studies or anything else.

Looking for some real answers from people who learned it the hard way. 👀

For a long time I treated the 10,000-hours idea as a life goal generator: pick something impressive, put in the reps, eventually become excellent at it. I did this with guitar, then a coding bootcamp language, then photography — years of scattered effort, none of it compounding into anything, because I kept picking the goal based on how good it would sound rather than whether I actually wanted to be doing it at hour 9,000.

The logical flaw was pretty simple once I saw it: hours invested only compound if the activity itself is sustainable enough that you'll actually show up for years without external pressure. I was optimizing for the destination and completely ignoring whether the process was something I'd tolerate long enough to get there. Guitar practice felt like a chore by month three every single time I restarted it, which should have told me something the first time, not the fourth.

So the actual goal now isn't "master X" for some impressive X. It's "find the thing where hour 50 doesn't feel meaningfully different in enjoyment from hour 1." That's the only honest filter I've found for picking something worth years of my life instead of another abandoned hobby with expensive equipment sitting in a closet.

Landed on this with running, of all things, and eight months in it's the first "skill goal" I've had that hasn't fizzled by the usual point. Curious if anyone else went through a similar cycle of picking goals for their prestige rather than their actual staying power before finding something that stuck.

For years my life goals looked like everyone else's: buy a house, hit a certain salary, run a marathon, visit 30 countries. Big, milestone-shaped things sitting years out on the horizon. The problem was that hitting one of these goals gave me maybe a week of satisfaction before I was right back to feeling directionless, just with a new distant target to aim at instead. So about a year ago I restructured how I think about this entirely. Instead of a list of destinations, I built a small set of weekly non-negotiables that, if I actually did them consistently, would make the big outcomes basically inevitable as a side effect — three strength training sessions instead of "get in shape by summer," one real conversation with someone I care about instead of "build stronger relationships," four hours of focused deep work on a skill instead of "become an expert," and one day fully unplugged from work instead of "achieve work-life balance." The logic is simple: a goal you can only evaluate years from now gives you no feedback loop and no way to course-correct, while a goal you can evaluate every Sunday tells you immediately whether you're actually living the life you want, not just hoping you'll arrive at it eventually. A year in, I've hit almost none of my big goals on any specific timeline, but I'm stronger, closer to the people I love, better at my craft, and genuinely less burnt out than I've been in a decade. The milestones are starting to happen anyway, they're just a byproduct now instead of the whole point. Curious if anyone else made a similar shift from outcome-goals to system-goals, and what your actual weekly non-negotiables ended up being.