My philosophy on what to do in life changes slightly, which leads to fairly big changes in the actual plan. My philosophy for when I was 24 was to live free. This has morphed into a philosophy of experiencing, learning and achieving, and a year later I focused on determining my life’s purpose. A year after that my philosophy became one of five “elements”: purpose, health, understanding and creativity, and doing things so as to decrease my anxiety. I’m now on the verge of yet another transformation, triggered by realizing that doing too much results in very little (and added frustration). Hence the Purge.
The idea of the Purge is simple: shed the superfluous elements of my life and focus on what’s really important. This was informed by a known weakness of mine where it takes me a lot of effort to start something (the threshold for starting a new activity is high), but once I’m into it I will find it very difficult to stop. A good test for this will be to imagine asking myself a year from now what I have achieved and being satisfied with the answer.
Some of the easy things fell off the list pretty quickly. The first one were the blogs I was subscribed to — I used to read about 200 blog posts a day, ranging from what was going on in New York City to a blog dedicated to making stuff. Given that I’m way behind on making stuff, and have enough to do in New York City, I purged the list to the most important 20 a day, mostly from reddit.com
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I was asked this recently by a friend and it seems appropriate to pose this question to you as a reply to this blog post; imagine some extraordinary event happens and you end up being time-shifted back to when you were 13, but only for a few seconds. What do you say to your 13yo self?
Right now? Nothing. Ask me in five years though.
The problem with that question is that it obviously helps you avoid things you regret in life (I don’t really have things like this) and possibly allows you to “reset” if you’re at a stage in life that you feel you fell into; but it doesn’t help you in the false negative case: what about the things I could have been doing now had I made different decisions in life? A far more useful extraordinary event would be to see your future based on the thoughts you have, in a time window of a few minutes, just like in Paycheck or that terrible movie, what was it called, oh yes, Next. I could “try on” different thoughts and see where the decisions these thoughts would have brought about and the effects these decisions would have brought about.
Oh wow thanks for that story, reading right now.
I’m not sure if you thought this through; while my first inclination was to say “well duh, I haven’t made any big mistakes and have no big regrets (sure, bunch of small ones but who cares),” though that’s not all you could do; what about positive events in your life? What about something you learned or realized that was very useful, helpful, eye-opening, whatever? What if you knew these things earlier? Still doesn’t solve the false negative case, but maybe something along that avenue?
Can I talk to the 9-year-old me instead (and assume that I could convince this much younger me of the importance of my message)? If so, I think it would be to try to explain to myself the importance of expressing preference. I haven’t been encouraged by anyone around me to do so and as a result I don’t think I think hard enough about what I really want.