If I had one rule to encompass my philosophy on life it would probably be: make conscious decisions. All the time. I believe, that as long as you live your life deliberately, making choices with intention, then you will never regret anything. This philosophy has stemmed from two major sources:
- Free Will by Sam Harris. This is a short book in which Harris explores – and ultimately debunks – the idea that humans have free will. Controversial as that idea is, I choose to embrace it in my life and since doing so, have felt more compassion for myself and for others, particularly in the mistakes we make. Each person has their own, unique experiences that shape the way they think. They have their own thoughts, feelings, struggles, and needs that no one else can truly understand. All the information that one person can ever know, comes from these unique experiences. This means no two people will ever have the same information at any time. Every time you make a decision, all you have is the information extrapolated from your unique life experiences with which to guide you. In comparison to the entirety of all information in the universe, we really don’t know a whole lot. Each time we make a decision, we do the best with the limited information that we have. What else can we do? By understanding that principle, it is easier to offer grace to people who make mistakes because they were just doing the best with the information they have. If I were you, and had only the information and life experiences you have, I would make the exact same decisions you make. By the same process, I can offer more grace to my past-self, for decisions that didn’t end up serving me in the best way. I made the very best decision I could have, given the information I had at the time.
If you have ever read the Allegory of the Cave, or seen the movie The Matrix, you can probably see (haha.. get it.. “see”) where I am going with this. Can you blame the man, who has only seen the shadows on the wall his entire life, for not knowing what an elephant looks like? Can you blame the people in the Matrix for not fighting against the robots? The answer is no. You can’t blame someone for what they don’t know. All you can do is try to offer more information.
2. “Circumstances and Choices” from the Stoic Coffee Break podcast by Erick Cloward. In this episode of the podcast, Cloward talks about how everything in life can be broken into two groups: circumstances or choices. Put another way: things you can not control, and things you can control. Your circumstances – or things you can not control – are elements in life such as other people’s thoughts or emotions, the country you are born in, aging. We must just accept these things as out of our control. However, that frees us up to focus on what we CAN control! Things such as what we want to do with our lives and where we want to spend our energy. By categorizing everything in our lives as either circumstance or choice, we can stop wasting our time trying to change things that we have no control over and place more emphasis on the choices we can make. Cloward takes this idea even farther by saying that we can choose to not-choose certain things. He gives the example of Steve Jobs and Barack Obama who paired down their respective wardrobes to just a few, very similar pieces in order to limit the energy they spend getting dressed. They choose to not choose what to wear. (P.S. this idea is also supported in Jay Shetty’s book, Think Like A Monk, where in he describes how monks choose to wear the same robes every day for the same reason).
I have combined these resources to create my own philosophy of making conscious decisions. Be it deciding to not decide, or deciding on action, as long as you do so consciously, and with intention, you will always be doing your best. And when you have done your best, you have nothing to regret.
The Thinking Issue 