Ask HN: How to think about direction in life/career?
I'd like to hear some ideas on how to get myself unstuck.
Before I get into it, I want to recognize how privileged this whole story is, and that myself 15y ago would laugh at how much this reeks of 1st world problems.

I'm having a hard time deciding what to do, both personally and professionally.

Personally, I'm conflicted about lifestyles I want to obtain. One day I'm ambitious and want to devote my life to building generational wealth, only to dream of a humble house and spending my time cooking simple meals. It's not that I think I wouldn't find some happiness in any of those possibilities – what bothers me is that I cannot completely decide where on that spectrum I'd like to aim for. A good example of this is the question of living in the US (on H1b/L1) vs. Europe, where I bounce between the two on a weekly basis, making it hard to either move or come to peace with where I am and move on.

Professionally it's a similar story.
I started coding in middle-school, and acquired generalist skills by working on many things throughout high school / college. I was and still am ambitious, albeit I lately started understanding it's a double-edged sword in a way.

Now I'm in late-twenties, came to FAANG straight from school, working on distributed systems at scale. My job is good, I get enough opportunities, get recognized very often, and there's room for me to grow. The shipping velocity and lack of accountability is not great but I don't think I can impact the culture enough for a meaningful change. Organizational overhead is frequently a mess and building trust with an ever-changing list of line managers and TLs takes away too much energy. Looking around, there aren't too many people I like or am excited about working with, but that tends to change often.
I used to think there were times where all I wanted to do was clear – learn more about databases, or build distributed systems, or coach and mentor peers, or get more money, or build effective teams, or start a self-bootstrapped side business to squeeze more money out of my skills, etc. I used to be more excited about tech as well, now it all seems less meaningful.

In the past year or so, I've struggled to define a meaningful & fulfilling direction. My answer to "what do you want to do?" is rarely consistent for more than a few days in a row. I now realize I never really knew what I was after, and I was just lucky to be happy with whatever I had stumbled upon. Do I want to pursue being a depth IC, manager, founding engineer in startups, or even a founder myself? Hard to control scope in these decisions. Thinking this over day-to-day is a recipe for anxiety and endless analysis-paralysis.

Most of my life I have had to work hard to create opportunities for myself, and open as many doors as possible. I was lucky to open quite a few. I now understand that I need to deliberately close some of the doors to move forward, and it goes against what got me here, hence so much friction.

I'm looking for fresh perspectives on conceptualizing or thinking about situations like this. Frameworks that peers and mentors often provide assume that I know what I want to do, and are concerned more with how to do it.

How do I limit the scope of my decisions? How do I ensure I can backtrack in case of a bad decision? What is even a bad decision? How to find things (or thing) that I want to do and be sure to do it for longer than a week? How do I commit without looking back? How to think productively about dependencies between these decisions?

Curious to hear stories as well. Where were you stuck, and how did it play out?

Many thanks, HN.