Your life is the story you tell about it
The real journey is how you see it. The real freedom is choosing your story. This week: on intentional goals, inner narratives, and the price of foresight.
December 13th, 2025 - Issue #147 - read online
👋 Welcome to Pursuit—your weekly pause for intentional living, self-discovery, and inner clarity. My name is Amir, and every week I share four carefully chosen ideas to help you design a more fulfilling life.
This week’s reflections:
🎯 Goals should guide you, not trap you
🚶🏻It will take you
🌱 Life is not what happens to you, it is the story you tell about it
🌿 The price of knowing too much
🎯 Goals should guide you, not trap you
We set goals to become happy, yet often the opposite happens. Traditional goals trap us in prediction: we assume we know what we want and how to get it, despite being furthest from that reality. Then we land the plane—get the body, the money, the promotion—only to discover it doesn’t feel the way we thought it would. This is the arrival fallacy: we’re terrible at predicting how any future event will make us feel.
The alternative? Intentional goals. Instead of chasing an outcome in the future, focus on who you want to be right now. Traditional goals are like airports—miss the runway and it’s a disaster. Intentional goals are like lighthouses—they help you navigate, not by giving you a destination, but by offering a light to orient yourself as reality reveals itself.
Ask yourself: does this goal help me become who I intend to be? Not someday. Today. Because all those moments between your goals are your life. The real question isn’t whether you cross the finish line—it’s what you’re learning about who you’re being along the way.
🚶🏻It will take you
Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you.
🌱 Life is not what happens to you, it is the story you tell about it
Life seems like an external journey, a series of obstacles and events we must navigate. But if you slow down enough to notice, you realize most of life is internal.
Beyond basic needs like food and shelter, much of what we chase is not reality but a story we have written. A story about what we think we need to be happy, to be respected, to feel worthy.
The truth is, it is just a story. Even the idea that you must prove yourself is a story.
When you see this clearly, it can feel unsettling. It means you have more freedom than you realize. You get to choose which stories to keep living by and which ones to let go. You get to decide what matters, not according to an external scoreboard, but your own.
The real journey is not what happens to you. It is the quiet, constant act of choosing how you see it.
Last night, lying in bed, I had one of those rare moments of clarity. I truly felt—not just understood, but felt—that everything in life depends on how your inner voice speaks to you.
When I was younger, that voice was harsh. A surgeon with demands. At social events, it would whisper: “You’re not a social butterfly. You should have talked to more people.” When I saw someone more successful, it would say: “You didn’t push hard enough. You can’t sacrifice like they did.”
But here’s what I’ve come to realize: that old definition of success is a complete fallacy. Success isn’t achieving what you think you should. It’s being at peace with who you are. It’s having an inner voice that’s a friend, not a critic.
And that realization is both liberating and terrifying. Liberating because you can rewrite the narrative at any time. Terrifying because it means you might have been holding yourself back all along—letting autopilot and old conditioning drive your feelings without ever questioning if they were truly yours.
The playground is infinite now. And that’s a lot of responsibility to sit with.
What would change if you stopped fighting yourself?
🌿 The price of knowing too much
Human beings hold a strange power, the ability to predict. Through symbols and words, we imagine the future, plan for it, and try to control it. It seems like an advantage, a way to protect ourselves.
But knowing the future also carries a heavy cost. We glimpse endings we can’t escape. Deep down, we all feel it, a quiet melancholy, a subtle sadness that comes from knowing everything eventually falls apart.
Other creatures move through life without this burden. A cat walks with dignity. A moth flies into a flame without fear. They live fully in each moment, free from the weight of what’s to come.
In trying to outsmart nature, we gained foresight, but lost spontaneity. We traded presence for anxiety. We built an identity, a self stitched together from memories and stories, and became trapped by the knowledge that even our story must end.
The more we cling to our history, the more we fear its inevitable close. And so, in gaining control, we also inherit a quiet, relentless unease.
✨ Alan Watts
🎵 Music I’m listening to
You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶
🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🦥 Slow rave: Sleepy techno for tired danced
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments
Previously on Pursuit:
This really resonated! Thank you so much for bringing these to us, Amir. 💙 It always makes my day to receive a piece from you!