17. Focusing solely on your own needs will make you happiest.
Despite what many corners of the Internet would have you believe, self-sufficiency is just a precursor to happiness. It is the foundation. It is crucial, but it is not the connectedness on which human beings thrive. Committing, sacrificing, trying and trying again for the people you love and the things you believe in are what make a life feel worthwhile. Meeting your own needs is the first step, not the ultimate goal.
15
READ THIS
if you
“DON’T KNOW
WHAT YOU’RE
DOING”
with your
LIFE
If you ask any young adult what their primary stressor in life is, it’s likely something that relates to uncertainty. If you were to boil it down to a sentence, it would be something along the lines of: “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
How many times have you heard someone say that? (How many times have you said that?) Probably a lot. The idea that we should know is a heaping pile of socially crafted bullshit that’s been superimposed on our psyches since kindergarten, and it’s holding us back.
Nobody—not one of us—knows “what we’re doing with our lives.” We can’t summarize the big picture, not yet. We don’t know what we’ll be doing in 5 years, and pretending that we can predict that isn’t being responsible or ambitious, it’s cutting ourselves off from living according to our inner navigation systems as opposed to the narrative we once thought would be right.
You owe nothing to your younger self.
You are not responsible for being the person you once thought you’d be.
But you do owe something to the adult you are today.
Do you know why you don’t have the things you once thought you wanted? Do you know why you’re not the person you once thought you’d be? Because you don’t want those things anymore. Not badly enough. If you did, you’d have and be them.
If you’re wondering “what you should do with your life,” it’s likely that you’re in the limbo between realizing you don’t want what you once did, and giving yourself permission to want what you want now.
Thinking you know what you’re “doing with your life” quells your hunger. It soothes your mind with the illusion that your path is laid out before you, and that you no longer have to choose, which is another way to say, you’re no longer responsible for becoming the person you want and need to be.
Hunger is important. Complete fulfillment is the fast track to complacency. People don’t thrive when they’re fulfilled. They stagnate.
So fuck knowing what you’re “going to do with your life.”
What are you doing today? Who do you love? What intrigues you? What would you do today if you could be anyone you wanted? If social media didn’t exist? What do you want to do this weekend?
“What do I want?” is a question you need to ask yourself every day. The things that run true will weave through your life, the ones that pop back up again and again are the ones you’ll follow. They’ll become the places you remain, the people you’re drawn to, the choices you make. The core truths will win out, even if other truths are lodged beside them.
Listening to it is saying: What do I want now?
16
8 COGNITIVE
BIASES
that are
CREATING
the way
YOU EXPERIENCE
YOUR LIFE
The good news is that your life is probably different than how you think it is. Unfortunately, that’s the bad news, too. As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says: “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”
Yet the tools for that construction are not only our experiences, hopes, desires, and fears. There are psychological biases that prevent us from seeing an objective reality. In a sense, our collective reality is nothing but subjective experience v. subjective experience. The people who do not understand this believe their subjective experience is, in fact, objective. Our inability to coexist is not out of lack or inherent social dysfunction, but simply a lack of understanding of the most fundamental aspects of the bodies we inhabit.
This phenomenon has been studied since ancient Greek philosophy, and it’s typically referred to as “naïve realism,” the assumption that we see the world as it actually is, and that our impression is an objective, accurate representation of reality. Psychologist David McRaney summarizes it as follows:
“The last one hundred years of research suggest that you, and everyone else, still believe in a form of naïve realism. You still believe that although your inputs may not be perfect, once you get to thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings are reliable and predictable. We now know that there is no way you can ever know an “objective” reality, and we know that you can never know how much of subjective reality is a fabrication, because
you never experience anything other than the output of your mind.
Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside your skull.”
So what are these biases that affect us so deeply? Well, for starters, while there are many that are identifiable, there’s nothing that says you can’t create your own, unique biases—and in fact, it’s likely that most people do.
Yet those are likely derived from some combination of the following.
