As a 30-something, it has recently become apparent to me that it is very easy to live a life you don't really care about. You start a job because it's the thing people expect you to do with your degree, chase some promotions because it feels nice to improve your status and win more money and without really paying attention you end up doing a job you rescent to keep living a life you dislike.
I obtained a job so that I could start a family and keep food on the table. I guess what you’re saying would make sense if you already had a retirement-level amount of money to begin with at age 18.
There's a culture that pushes us to "dream big" (e.g. build a unicorn startup, become a billionaire). That's usually awfully ambitious, and as feasible as winning the lottery for most of us.
We should be pragmatic about our life goals. They should be ambitious, but achieavable.
Even if we don't control a lot of factors in our lives we at least have the power to influence them, most of the time it comes in the form of "trade-offs". So you've got to be prepared to make some sacrifices in the present for making progress towards a future goal.
I also acknowledge that some of us have a head start due to our social/economical background, and we should be grateful for that.
It is not like if you see ambition as something less than a moral good you will no longer get anything done. You will just turn off this useless modeling of future events in your head.
I suspect in our culture, ambition causes nothing but useless pain and is counter productive at the average as people model their future life up to these highly improbable lottery winning situations.
Climbing Mount Everest is really the best metaphor. Massive risk for basically no reward. The whole idea is objectively stupid but seen as some great accomplishment in our culture.
Let's face facts. If our ancestors never had any ambition we would still be hunter-gatherers. We would probably have the same level of happiness and sadness since we would never know anything different. Flowing through life is a choice that works for some.
It's said that it's the journey not the goal so make the journey fun. If there are ever a set of people that can figure out how to solve a problem, HN has them. So,figure out how to solve your dream problem.
True, doing nothing is so much easier but I don't recommend it since you won't like the result.
Then there are things in life you can't really prepare yourself for because they are, well, life altering. For instance, when you marry, there's only so much you can do to prepare for the probability of losing your partner through death and divorce. The practicalities, such as notary's and testaments, are fairly trivial to deal with. Living through the experience and confronting yourself with reality as it happens? That's a wholly different ball game.
But of course you had no control over whether you would tell anyone that, so I shouldn't question your decision.
The whole notion of 'should' is absurd under such a philosophy.
You control how you play the hand
And you control at how you take joy in the game.
Life goals and dreams are hard because of their innate complexity to achieve them. It's easy to state "I want to start a family" or "I want to become a business owner" or "I want to climb Everest". It's the execution which is hard because that relies on so many variables most of which you don't really control.
Social background, economic background, your health, your personality, your skills and abilities, your awareness of opportunities or lack thereof, ingrained beliefs and biases, education level, culture, current events, family dynamics, upbringing,...
The notion that you're in control of what happens in your life is a convenient belief, not a hard fact. It's only when that belief is shattered by hard reality that you start to understand that life doesn't necessarily follow the script you had in mind when you're young.
The kicker then is understanding that happiness isn't to be found only when you reach the end of the rainbow, when you finally achieve the dream. It's there along the road, between the rubble and troubles that life throws at you. It's found in what you make out of each day you're given in good health.