Ask Again: “What Should I do?”
“What should I do?” It’s the question every one of your actions answers. The process leading to your actions occurs either through conscious thought and reflection, or unconsciously. Making this process conscious can be learned. With complete mastery, you can always ask yourself; “What should I do?”
Asking the question doesn’t guarantee a good answer. And answering the question is your task, no one else’s. The process is the same every time while the content of the answer must change since the context in which you ask the question changes every time. No two situations are the same.
The answer can be easy or difficult. It can be known instantly or needs some figuring out. Sometimes, another question is the only possible answer. Finding no answer, leading to no action, might be the worst outcome of all. It resembles overthinking but without ever stopping.
The answer depends on the context which is made of information, your goals and energy.
The amount of information is infinite. And the information that you have got is what forms the options you have in your actions. This text is a piece of information that might add an option to some of your future actions. The more information you have the more available options to take action exist.
The nature of information exposes some of your limitations. First, you will never aim for something that you don’t know exists, something you aren’t informed about. It’s by definition, impossible. You can't aim to become the president of the United States in 2024 if you aren't even aware of the United States' existence. Second, you will never have all the information. Information is just the state of what is. Since things change all the time and everywhere, you can‘t ever have all the information.
Consider this example. There are a lot of cafes and restaurants in Paris. You want to compare and rank them. You make a list and proceed by testing one each day. By the time you test the last one on your list, a number of the ones you tested before changed their menu, hired a new chef or barista, changed supplier, refined their recipes, or closed. New ones might have opened as well. Given the constraints of visiting one every day, you will never be able to have all the information about all the cafes and restaurants in Paris. The information you can gather about restaurants and cafes in Paris is infinite.
Unless you are all the information, meaning you have access to it immediately and all the time, information is infinite. This implies something else, namely that the information you have is selective. Selected, by you, your conscious and unconscious you. And your options, actions and their outcomes depend on this selective information you have.
Based on the information you have and that you are aware of, you can decide on the goals you want to follow. Goals are the reason why you would choose one action over another. Actions solely serve goals and selecting the appropriate actions is the only reason you are aware of actions in the first place.
As a desired outcome is defined by you through your goals, if you don’t do so consciously then it will be done unconsciously. Being hungry for example, or being cold will make you take certain actions. You will do what’s necessary to get food or you might find a heater to warm yourself up. These outcomes are defined by you, just unconsciously. But you can also decide to not eat for three days or to stay in cold water for thirty minutes or to delete your Instagram and never scroll again or to not kill people. This needs to be done consciously though. You can define the outcome, the goals. The benefit is that you can channel and allocate energy towards it.
Energy available to reach goals is limited because you yourself are limited by the energy that keeps you alive and because you are limited by the energy you are able to channel from your environment. You can optimize the generation of your own energy, and leverage this energy by allocating it directly to your goals, or indirectly, by using your energy to channel other sources of energy towards your goals. This will align your actions with a desired outcome. You don’t want your actions to take you off the path of your goals. And so, because actions take energy and without energy there would be no actions, how you use your limited energy to get to your goals is probably the most important factor of whether you will get there or not.
How should you optimize the generation and allocation of energy available to put towards achieving goals? Well, it depends on your goals, and therefore on you.
Asking; “What should I do?” is the first step to search and select information, define goals, take actions and channel energy to put towards these goals. Since every human is truly unique and there are no two humans that experience the exact same reality, the answer must be different every time. It’s true. You want, in order to live, ask yourself; “What should I do?”
Thank you to Claudia, Maxime, Solène, Jehanne and my dad for reading first drafts of this and their suggestions.