Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room… yes the title does seem like a contradiction, but I assure you it is not. Before I can go on to explain how goals and spontaneity can go together like tracksuits and the Russian mob, I guess I should introduce myself.

Hi my name is Joe, and along with my wife, Kelly, we are going to be using this blog as a way to track our adventures as we navigate our way through life. Both Kelly and I are 20 something year old engineers who graduated from the University of Florida (GO GATORS!). Along with our adorable cat Bean (I’m sure we’ll have stories to share about her in the future), we’ve been on a very logical path through life. Kelly and I both excelled in grade school, excelled at a top public university, and landed where we are today: earning good salaries at fancy engineering jobs in Austin, TX.

All of that leads us here: we’ve met our goals– now what?

We could continue on our logical path that dictates buying a house is the next step in ensuring a successful life. However, through all of our successes so far, we never truly stopped to answer the question: “What makes us happy?”. After some deliberation, we determined that the days we’re happiest are those in which we wake up and get to choose how we want to spend that day with no one to report to. Through months of talking and analyzing we determined that our lives need more agency and spontaneity.

Now I know I can already see your eyes rolling to the back of your head as you read that previous sentence. I know if I had read that sentence, some of my responses might have been “no shit Sherlock” or “wow captain obvious”. While those responses are warranted, if you give me a chance I’ll try to defend why that concept has become so important to us. Wow you’re still here? Did that cute picture of Bean get you to keep scrolling?

You’ve made it this far, so it’s probably time for me to start explaining. Most of our lives we’ve been so focused on hitting the next goal, and every time we’ve hit a goal, we’ve realized that hitting goals doesn’t bring us happiness, instead it just opens up a door to even more goals. With both of us being engineers, we tend to lay out the logical path to success, and that form of thinking just leads to more goal setting. The hampster wheel of success, if you will.

I don’t know if you picked up on the keyword I just used but I’ll go ahead and point it out to you: “success”. All this life-long goal setting has focused on success, and I always just assumed happiness was a byproduct of success. Success is something you can plan and work towards so it seemed like the logical path to follow if happiness is an added bonus. So this leaves us a crossroads. Instead of prioritizing success like we have been wired to do our whole lives, we are aiming to prioritize happiness in this stage of life. The way I see it, we are left with one option to create goals that lead to a spontaneous life.

In the next blog post I’ll go ahead and outline our goals to lead us to a more adventurous life. Figured I would give you another bean picture for the road. Isn’t she adorable?

— Joe Maura