For the past couple of days, I noticed something peculiar while I was journaling. I was feeling a sense of being lost somewhere in the dark.
I felt pointlessness. It is an uncomfortable feeling. This feeling of lacking clarity, disorientation in life, everything seems hazy, and that similar feeling of heaviness in my chest.
It seems bizarre when you realize everyone feels the same way. It is as if there is something wrong with all of us.
Why are we all clueless in life?
If everyone is feeling it, then you might realize that maybe there is nothing wrong with us. It is the way it should be.
Now that you know the backdrop thought, let’s sort this out.
Table of content
Why do we feel directionless?
The first answer that comes to our mind is “because we don’t know where life is headed”. Well, that is true, but there is more to it than that. Even if we had a destination in mind, we would still feel just as confused. I will go into details one by one.
Case 1: When you don’t have any destination in mind
This is seemingly straightforward. We feel directionless because we are directionless. Let’s just sit on that thought for a moment and ask why?
Let’s do a simple exercise.
I want you to pick a team that might win the next World cup.
Got a team in mind?
Good.
Now I want you to make a bet on it.
Will you do it?
No?
You just picked a team that you thought will win the next world cup, which means this team has a higher probability to win the world cup.
But why did you hesitate despite the odds in your favor?
This is termed as ‘Ambiguity aversion‘. Click on it if you want to read more about it.
In a nutshell, what it means is that you will prefer decent but certain outcomes to good but uncertain outcomes.
You can blame the natural selection for favoring timidity over boldness, but the fact remains we are more timid than bold.
We cringe at uncertainty and ease at certainty.
If you are getting bored at Psychology lessons, then the point is that we hate uncertainty and avoid it at all costs.
An uncertain life ahead being a nightmare for us is quite natural when you understand this.
Case 2: When you have a destination in mind
This is the more interesting one as this is counterintuitive.
What this means is that if you have a destination in mind or decided on a decision, you would still feel clueless.
Allow me to explain with a help of an example.
Imagine that I’m a chef and asked you to pick one dish out of the three I made. Since we are imagining it, let’s take the liberty to assume that I’m an excellent chef.
So your choice is to pick one, and that is it.
Then I give you the dish. Oh, Heaven!
As you are savoring my delicious dish, a thought will come to your mind. How do the other two taste like?
Are they as good as this one? Maybe they better? Are they worse?
Uncertainty again!
This is the problem. Even if you have a destination in your mind, when you are traveling in your path, you will wonder, where do the other roads lead to? Will it be better than this one? Did I pick the wrong one?
A thousand questions will fill your mind, making you just as confused as you were before.
From the two cases that we have discussed, we can say that whether you have a decision or a destination in your mind, regardless of which you will eventually feel a pointlessness or cluelessness.
This makes sense because all of us feel the same directionlessness regardless of everything we do.
All of this is making me think that the feeling of confusion like happiness, sadness or fear, just comes and goes as you live your life. It’s just that we don’t talk about confusion as much as we talk about the rest.
What to do if you are directionless?
Before you read further, I want you to think of me as a friend who is suggesting something which he thinks might work than an expert of the matter who is prescribing the antidote.
Expect this to be your new normal
Our school has taught us that there are answers to every question and not just that, there are right and wrong answers as well.
Though this works in schools and colleges, this doesn’t work in life.
If you search for answers to every question in your life, it will leave you with anything but answers.
We need to accept that there are questions that are too complicated and too variable that we can’t conclude at a single answer.
Learn to live in some degree of uncertainty because the only thing certain is uncertainty.
I guess you can put it beautifully as life will never cease to surprise you.
The first step to overcome this is to dump all that school believes in finding the right answers. There are just answers. You just have to pick the one that you think suits you the best.
This is a trial-and-error game, all you can do is give your best bet and move on to the next one if it failed.
Think, decide, and stop thinking
This is a strategy that I devised and use for shopping mainly.
The problem for me while shopping was that after some comparison, I would buy something and after buying it, I would again compare to see if I made a mistake.
That was a stupid thing to do because I couldn’t change anything, if I made a mistake I would have to live with it. So the whole thing was just a source of misery.
So I decided I would only buy something after I’m sure that it is not a mistake and won’t think about it after I bought something.
This was an immense relief for me.
Maybe we can use the same technique in life as well.
Do your research before you make your decision. Once you made your decision, stick to it. Don’t think too much about it afterward. Otherwise, what was the point of researching in the beginning?
The logic behind it is that, if we are constantly comparing something with others, we will find something better. Thus ending up feeling regretted by our choice.
If it is a reversible decision, then don’t sweat it, just pick one and if you didn’t like it, change.
Only if it is an irreversible decision then you must think about the decision making.
Much of our sadness comes from our comparison with others.
When we see others doing better than us, we will feel sad.
When we see others doing worse than us, we will feel relieved.
Decisions bases on comparisons are not wonderful decisions as we base them on what other people think and what worked for others, both of which are variable and don’t necessarily align with what you want.
Stop trying to justify and validate all your choices because some choices simply don’t have justifications or validations.
Change ‘I’ to ‘He/She’
Have you ever felt this strange phenomenon?
This strange phenomenon in which if your friend is in trouble, you will have millions of suggestions and recommendations. But when you are in that same trouble, you will be clueless.
It’s like if we can only think and make rational decisions only if we have nothing at stake. When you have something at stake, our emotions will flood us, eroding our rationality. We are great at giving advice but terrible at sticking to it.
A solution to this is to think about what will you suggest if this was your friend.
It is easier to find the answer when you change ‘What should I do?’ to What should he/she do?’ This simple change in nouns can drastically change the rationality of our answers.
A very simple yet effective technique to make rational decisions.
Know yourself better
Most of your life decisions will boil down to one thing.
‘What is your preference?’
You can only make the right decisions in life only if you know all your preferences.
If you are clueless in life, then probably your problem like me can be summarized in a single statement as ‘I don’t know what I want in life.’
This sounds silly, but this is a very genuine problem.
We lack the experience or self-awareness to understand our preferences.
The problem in my case is that I can only tell my preference if I tried it and also my preferences keep changing as well.
To know your preferences, you need to have as much as diverse life experiences as possible and develop a sense of self-awareness to know what you like and dislike.
Randomness over determinism
Determinism is the school of thought that this world is perfectly rational and you can predict the future by knowing the current state of everything (Click on it if was want to read more about it).
Randomness is the idea that the events are random and that you can’t find a direct correlation between the present state and the future one.
Why are we talking about this mumbo jumbo?
We are deterministic. We are trying to predict the future by observing the current state of affairs.
Though determinism is sensible and is right in its way, with life choice it is just too complex to be useful.
There are just two problems with trying to predict the future by looking at the present.
- You need to have all the information about the present, which is impractical.
- You need to identify the correlations and various interplays of the variables and formulate an equation that works if you want to predict the future.
The above two tasks are virtually impossible to do for us in our simple life. So we just accept the randomness of life and powerlessness in it.
If you have understood nothing about what I have been talking about, just know that the direction in which we are swimming in our life has to do a lot with the current that’s pushing us than the direction in which we are swimming. So when you feel like your life is drifting away in a different direction than you expected, have the realistic realization of how little control we have in our life.
That might appear dreadfully pessimistic. But I mean it as a piece of consolation. If you think that your life is not going the way you wanted it to be, know that it not just your fault. The current might also be against you.
If you can’t find the answer, look for people who did
You don’t have to find the solutions to all your problems all by yourself. You will have friends and family who will help you find answers. If they failed you. Then look at the people who found the answers you are searching for.
Read a book, watch a movie, listen to someone talk, hear some music. You might find answers to all your problems somewhere. You just need to keep looking for it.
Even if they can’t give a direct answer, it might give you a way to find your answers.
Let’s capsulate everything
Wrap up
In this blog post, we were trying to get our head our two questions.
Why do we feel directionless?
What to do if we feel directionless?
We talked about resetting the normal, some technique, changing noun, unwrapping yourself, and finding others who found the solution, all of which might help you give some sense of direction in your life
Hope you found something useful in this post.
Cheers.