My New Life Framework

Six pillars of meaning which I hope will sustain me for the rest of my life; developed over the past year on sabbatical.

Summary

Achieving all my worldly goals in my 20s (culminating with becoming a US permanent resident in 2022) triggered an existential crisis over what I would do for the rest of my life. I developed the following six-point framework that I hope will provide a deep sense of meaning for the next few decades:

• Fight climate change (or a similarly meaningful problem)

• Parenthood

• Religion and spirituality

• Health and fitness

• Family and friends

• Professional excellence

The rest of this post covers all of this in more detail.

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Me, obsessed with myself c. 2019

The Old Goal-Driven Life of My 20s

I’ve always meticulously planned my life. Starting from high school when I binge-read the classic self-help books, everything I did had to fold up to some larger vision.

I achieved all those worldly goals in my 20s, much faster than I had anticipated (MA).

This includes but is not limited to: starting a startup (Priceoye), becoming a senior-level product designer, becoming just a lil’ famous and developing a strong global network (by running the UXDP design community), getting married, traveling widely, moving to Silicon Valley (thank you Motive), and making great money.

All of this goal-seeking culminated in 2022 when I got my green card (aka US permanent residency). The green card felt like the crowning achievement of my professional life, because it represented the completion of multiple prior goals. It meant I had made it in Silicon Valley on my own terms, and now had a solid foundation upon which to build the rest of my life.

I was ecstatic for a couple of days, but then that nagging Type-A personality thought came back: “Okay, but what now?”

This triggered an existential crisis. While I had planned my life up to this point, I hadn’t given any material thought to intentional living thereafter. What goals should I strive for — and what is the meaning of life — when I had gotten everything I ever wanted?

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The New Pillars of Meaning

I went on sabbatical in February 2023 so I could address this existential crisis (among the pursuit of some other goals). After a lot of introspective downtime, countless journal entries, and many conversations with trusted family and friends, I’ve developed this framework that I hope will sustain me for the foreseeable future.

Fight climate change

Athabasca Glacier, Jasper National Park, Canada. The sign shows where the glacier was in 1992, the year I was born. It has receded dramatically in the last 30 years, and is only speeding up.

I picked all my previous jobs based on a simple hill-climbing algorithm: go for the opportunity that offers the fastest path towards my career, financial, and intellectual goals.

Going forward, I will instead pick opportunities based primarily on how much I can meaningfully contribute to the fight against climate change, or other causes important to me. This doesn’t mean I’ll forego career, financial or intellectual progress. It just means those will not be my main drivers anymore.

I care a lot about the Earth. So I hope that applying my professional skills directly towards the climate will be a great source of meaning until we solve this thing.

Associated actions:

• Work as a product designer in a climatetech company, or in a climate role in a larger company.

• Join activist movements to help influence climate policy.

• Support climate-related charitable causes in Pakistan.

Parenthood

Baby me with adult Mama c. 1993

Family members and friends with kids have always framed starting a family as simply the next logical step in life, but I just couldn’t ever accept such a significant life change that way. I had to develop some sort of rationale for it to click. After talking to dozens of parents, here’s what I’ve concluded:

• Children widen the emotional spectrum of life. Yes, they might increase your suffering, but they can also expose you to unbounded happiness and contentment.

• Profundity. Every parent speaks of this profound, inexplicable full-stack change that takes place when they have their first child. The change includes the sudden development of new parental instincts. It also includes feelings of nurturing, protection, unconditional love, responsibility, awe, wonder, and purpose. You suddenly understand why humans have been making babies for hundreds upon thousands of years. And you only really get it once you do it yourself.

• I am ready to take on parenthood. I think it will be the most meaningful experience of my life. It is entirely possible that raising a couple of good, kind-hearted, smart, ambitious human beings will be the most impactful thing I can do. By now, I have also accumulated some hard-won knowledge and wisdom that I would like to pass on so that it may benefit the world.

Religion and spirituality

Carmel Beach c. 2022. If you know you know.

I was an agnostic monotheist until a transcendental experience in 2022 dramatically altered my views towards religion and spirituality — opening my heart to the metaphysical, and the mysterious.

Growing up, I felt alienated by the way Islam was taught in Pakistan, and how it was represented globally. While I was living in Pakistan, I did the bare minimum to get by and fit in (think: Friday prayers, and fasting during Ramadan). I lost that threadbare connection when I moved to America in 2019. Moreover, we moved to the Bay Area which is particularly not conducive to maintaining a religious outlook.

But deep inside, I always felt there had to be more to Islam than the local Pakistani flavor of the 2000s, and that I owed it to myself to explore it on my own terms. I also found inspiration in many modern Muslims who successfully integrated modern Western thinking with Islam; these folks especially helped maintain my curiosity. The list includes my father, one of my cousins, an old classmate from college, as well as famous intellectuals like Jinnah, Iqbal, and Muhammad Asad.

My sabbatical gave me enough downtime to prioritize the exploration of Islam. I have been on-and-off studying Islamic history, the Quran, and related texts. Given my western bent, my processing of it all has been grounded in some sense of rationality. Though of course I know there are times where one just has to let go.

I have also started praying with some regularity. Just like meditation (which I’ve practiced for 5+ years now), I see the daily prayers as short breaks from worldly affairs. These breaks help me to recalibrate my emotions, and to quiet the ego. Religious prayers have the added benefit of helping one reconnect with the transcendental, which is perhaps the ultimate spiritual balm.

My hope is that the continued exploration and practice of religion and spirituality will be a source of meaning in my life, especially as I try to balance it with modernity’s hyper-individualism, 24/7ism, consumerism, over-rationalization, and loss of community.

Health and fitness

Socrates k dolay dekho 💪

“It is a shame for a man to grow old, without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” —Socrates

Health and fitness on its own is not a source of meaning in life, but it sure as hell feels great. It has a multiplier effect on everything else. The stronger I feel, the better I can both amplify life’s highs, and soften its lows. And the faster I can then progress on all the other pillars in this essay.

I was an exercise-hating, junk-food-guzzling, overweight college student in 2016. It only took 7 years, dozens of relapses and failed experiments, but I’ve finally reached a stage I’m proud of my health and fitness system. My weight is under control. I absolutely love working out everyday. I’m continously improving stamina, strength, and flexibility. My meals are both healthy and delicious (I used to think you couldn’t do both — surely a result of having McDonaldsbrain.)

Here’s a high-level overview of everything I do now:

• Daily workouts. The more intense the better, except of course when recovering. I previously only enjoyed the post-exercise high of having worked out — everything else sucked. But now, I not only enjoy working out itself (especially when it’s challenging), but I also genuinely look forward to my next workout.

• Variety of movement. I enjoy novelty in movement, so I keep switching up my workouts. Everything from yoga, strength training, rowing, cycling, walking, running, tennis, hiking, and kickboxing, with more to come. Keeps things fresh.

• Time in the sun. There’s science behind this, but you don’t need to know it to enjoy the amazing feeling that comes from just 10-15 minutes in the sun. Ideal if done with my morning chai.

• Nutritious food, eaten mindfully. Food is one of the greatest pleasures of life. Eating it with your full attention, doubly so. Thanks to my wife for continually iterating on our meals to include more whole foods, vegetables, protein, and less processed foods, red meat, sodium, and sugar. We’ve discovered so many meals that are both nutrious and tasty. I’ve also improved my relationship with food by observing how I feel after eating certain foods. Junk food makes me feel like, well, junk. And so I’ve slowly replaced bad-feeling food with good-feeling food.

• Cold showers. These are an acquired taste, but they provide me an instant reset and big dose of energy and positivity in the morning. Sometimes when I just feel anxious for no good reason, I’ll take a cold shower to zap those feelings away.

• Regular sauna. The opposite of a cold shower, and refreshing in its own way.

• Miscellaneous items like a near-non-negotiable 8–9 hours of sleep, plenty of water, skincare, and intermittent fasting.

Family and friends

Mama, Baba and me c. 1995

I never had a hard time making new friends back in Pakistan. But that changed when I moved to the Bay Area.

One of the hard things about being an immigrant here is that I’m too Pakistani for the Americans, and too American for the Pakistanis. The Goldilocks zone is extremely limited.

I didn’t really care about this for the first few years in California. Life was like an intoxicating daydream. I was blown away by the adundance of it all: natural beauty, personal freedom, economic opportunity, financial independence, smart and ambitious like-minded people, ideal weather. And work kept me so busy.

But now, I do miss my family and old friends a lot. The unconditional love and support. The shared histories. There’s magic in relationships where the other person has witnessed the complete arc of your character. Included in this are of course your parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, as well as friends from school and college. They get you in a way others just cannot.

This is by far the harshest tradeoff of moving to the Bay Area. I wish I could move them closer to me. Of course, that’s not going to happen so here’s what I’m going to do to address the family and friends-sized hole in my heart:

• Make time (and expense) to visit family in Pakistan up to two times a year.

• Continue developing the deepest, most meaningful relationship of my life aka with my wife.

• Carve out time to meet close friends at least once a year, ideally as a fun vacation in a new country.

• Find excuses to meet with and develop closer bonds with the friends I already have in the Bay Area.

• Prioritize phone calls over soulless texts on birthdays, annual holidays, anniversaries etc.

• Express love and affection for family and friends while I still have them (kal ho na ho.)

Quick sidenote. As an introspective person who enjoys developing self-knowledge, I’ve come to realize: the path to truly understanding oneself goes through one’s parents. We are literal variant-copies of our parent’s collective codebase. This forms the foundation of one’s personality, early worldview, and default behaviors. To know thyself, know thy parents first.

Professional excellence

Samples from The Met

“Work is love made visible.” —Kahlil Gibran, On Work

I was utterly blown away last year when I visited the Persian and Mughal sections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka The Met) in New York. Here were absolutely astounding examples of incredible craftsmanship. Paintings that told stories the more you looked at them. Rugs with intricate detail. Tiles with the most dazzling colors and psychedelic patterns. This was my cultural heritage.

That visit to The Met prompted the development of this sixth and final pillar of meaning: professional excellence for its own sake. The pouring of oneself into the work, as a gift to the world. As a heartfelt contribution to humanity during my little sojourn on Earth.

Associated action items:

• Write regularly. More than anything else, I find myself naturally creating my best work in words.

• As a product designer, go beyond Figma. Develop a stronger product building skillset covering business, engineering, sales and marketing. Learn tools like Framer, Spline, SwiftUI, and Origami to level up my work. Stay on the cutting edge of AI to exponentially increase my productivity.

• Go broad. Study architecture, history of ideas, calligraphy, culture and more. These have the power to enrich one’s work in subtle ways that you only realize much, much later.

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Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the framework. Did anything in particular resonate with you? I look forward to comments on the original social media posts.

Thanks to Omer Imran and Sara Qiam for giving feedback on early versions of this essay.