Some things are best left implicit. They are beautiful because they are mysterious.

Sometimes better, faster, stronger isn’t better at all.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig argued that quality can’t be defined because it transcends language when he wrote: “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

Have you ever enjoyed watching a movie and then talked to someone after who is a superfan that tells you all the ways the storyline breaks the cannon and how this and that sucks? Now your view of the movie is forever tainted.

Have you ever really loved a video game so much that you go to work on building one, only to find out that they are (mostly) purposefully built to extract money. Now you notice it in nearly every game.

Your quality of life can be like that.

Too much analysis ruins it.

I’ll admit that I feel a pang of unworthiness when I see people that have a manifesto-like life plan built out with clearly defined values aligned with short and long-term goals that they’ve been able to articulate succinctly. They seem to have analyzed things to perfection.

I’m not judging. If that is working for you that’s awesome.

Aside from the occasional journal exercise, I can’t analyze my values and goals and ultimately judge my quality of life in that way. It feels like I’m trying to control the life I think I want instead of living and loving the one I have.

I don’t pretend to try to know exactly why my values are the way they are and how I’m going to perfectly embody them. I’ll let that come through dreams, grow through experience, and intuit the quality of my life by how I feel.

Not everything needs to be analyzed.