When you're stuck, just do something

Thinking about what we should be doing with our lives feels productive. Since we have such limited time, the biggest mistake would be to waste it on the wrong thing. Right? So we sit there, searching deep in our minds — hoping a clear thought might suddenly reveal itself. Weighing different options and ranking alternatives. Like trying to find the right frequency on a radio that only produces a loud static. We never find it. To get some relief, we turn to inspiration. What are others doing? But rather than narrowing the list of options, our peeks into the lives of others makes the list endless. So many lives we could be living. The more options we add, the more overloaded our brain becomes. Because having too few alternatives was never the problem in the first place. Our quest for finding the best thing to spend our time on comes from good intentions. We want to try to maximize our happiness and potential. Live the best version of our lives. But in reality, it's one of the biggest traps we can fall into. There are an infinite amount of things we could be pursuing at any given time. Ideally, we would know exactly what we want out of life and choose to do the things that bring us closer to that vision. There's just one small problem: knowing what we want is really hard. Especially knowing what our long term goals and objectives are. What I've found after struggling with these ideas for a while is that we don't really need to have our overall life vision figured out. It's pointless. We just need to find one small mission we have right now and do stuff that gets us closer to achieving it. Instead of overthinking what I want to do with my life, I've tried to reframe it as "what am I genuinely curious about right now?" and just picking any path that comes to mind that I find interesting right then and there. What happens along the way when following this trail of curiosity is that we start picking up small pieces to our puzzle — gaining clues to what brings us joy and satisfaction, learning what makes us anxious and stressed. What we might come to find is that the best clues can sometimes be found in the most unpredictable places. By going on a curiosity-expedition we discover stuff about ourselves we wouldn't have figured out by trying to force any sort of lifestyle or outcome. We learn what we are good at and how we can contribute to those around us. We meet people that lead us on unexpected paths. At the end of the day, it's okay to be a visionary. But I think it's equally important to be an explorer too. So what is the optimal thing I could be doing with my life? I have no idea. All I know is that right now I felt like getting this idea out of my head and into writing. That's enough.