Roger Has No Five Year Plan

Day 236 – July 17, 2026

Roger has no idea what he is doing with his life. This does not appear to bother him. He has no five year plan. No quarterly goals. No personal brand strategy. He has never once worried whether his professional trajectory reflects his full potential. Frankly, his LinkedIn must be a disaster.

And yet every morning he gets up absolutely convinced the day contains something worth investigating. A walk. A smell. A ball. Some suspicious activity happening three houses away that clearly requires his full attention.

Maybe food. Hopefully food. Almost definitely food.

There is something enviable about that. I spend so much time thinking about what comes next. What should I build? What should I write? Where should I pitch? How do I grow the site? What happens if this works? What happens if it does not?

Meanwhile Roger has discovered a stick. His afternoon is booked.

I am not suggesting I abandon all responsibility and begin living entirely according to the emotional guidance of a pit bull. Although there are worse management systems. But I think he understands something I keep forgetting. Not every moment needs to lead somewhere. Some things are allowed to simply be good.

That is difficult for me lately because so much of my life suddenly feels connected to possibility. A post can bring readers. A reader can become an opportunity. An opportunity can lead to work. Work can lead somewhere else.

Everything starts acquiring invisible arrows. Useful. Also exhausting. Sometimes a walk should just be a walk.

Today I watched Roger stop to investigate something in the grass with the seriousness of a forensic scientist. There was nothing there. At least nothing visible to the inferior human nose. But whatever it was mattered immensely for approximately twenty seconds. Then he moved on. No rumination. No strategic review. No emotional attachment to the previous smell. Incredible. Imagine. As humans, we could never. We would form a committee about the smell and think about what it meant for three years. Roger simply lives where his feet are. Four of them, which may provide an advantage.

I have spent so much of this year somewhere else mentally. Back there. What happened. What I should have done. What somebody else should have done. What might happen. What could happen. What I need to prepare for.

The present got crowded out. That is happening less now. Not because I have mastered mindfulness. I remain terrible at sitting still and thinking about breathing. My brain immediately wants a side quest. But I am getting better at noticing when something is nice. A walk. A breeze. Roger being ridiculous. Something good to eat. A sentence I like. The way the apartment feels when it is quiet and I am actually comfortable inside it. A conversation that makes me laugh harder than expected.

Nothing monumental. Just pieces of a day.

There is so much pressure to turn life into a story while it is happening. I am guilty of that for obvious occupational reasons. But sometimes the scene does not need a thesis. Sometimes the dog found a good stick. That is enough. I want more of that in my life. More moments I do not immediately convert into productivity, meaning, proof, progress, or content.

Some things should remain useless. Beautifully useless. Fun is useless. Rest is useless. Watching your dog spend three minutes trying to carry something twice the width of a doorway is useless. Maybe uselessness is one of the luxuries I am finally getting back.

When survival takes over, everything becomes important. Everything carries weight. Every decision feels consequential. There is not much room for pointless joy. I would like to reclaim some. Roger seems willing to provide training. His rates are outrageous and mostly payable in cheese.

Still. Worth it.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And absolutely no idea what the dog is doing, which seems to be working beautifully for him.