Are you also finding yourself nearly paralysed by the stress of big decisions? We have a few existentially monumental decisions ahead of us, and we have known for a long time that we have to make these decisions. And yet, week after week turned to month after month of not being able to decide.

Why aren’t we able to pick which decision to run with? Why are the options paralysing us? I think it is perhaps in part poverty mentality. Being fearful of that there won’t be the option to change the choices we make now, the path we choose now. Being fearful of being stuck with whatever we settle on. (Of course you should ask yourself as we do: “What would be so bad about sticking with the path we choose, won’t it bring new experiences and opportunities of it’s own? Things we can’t even guess yet until we make a choice..”)

For us choice and the fear of once we have chosen having no more choice is tightly wound up with out sense of freedom and simultaneously with, as I said above, poverty mentality.

If you (we) didn’t have poverty mentality choosing should be simple. Just choose now and change later. It’s the fear of having every other option taken off the table that seems to paralyse and make it impossible to decide anything and instead waste months looking at the menu.

Speaking of menu.

How do you go grocery shopping? Do you walk into your favourite supermarket and feel paralysed by the options of ingredients, unable to decide which to buy because if you don’t buy the other ones then you won’t be able to cook the other possible dishes? No, of course you don’t experience the choice of groceries and goods in this way. If you are anything like myself then you allow yourself to be inspired and feel joy at loading your basket. Even if some of the items in your basket are in there purely for inspiration and want, not because they have a very specific purpose. However You go grocery shopping, it probably is not with the fear of never being able to return to select ingredients for a future meal. You know and trust that the supermarket will be here next week and you don’t have to feel the burden of having to make decisions for the rest of history right now. You can take it one grocery shopping trip at a time.

Life..

Can’t life be more like buying groceries? The choices that are paralysing us, you, me, them, anybody, should be joyful opportunities, not evidence that we should fear and stress the gravity of life. Maybe age plays a part.

Should we talk about this another time? Age and how it influences the lightness or gravity of our choice making.

I don’t claim to have arrived at a conclusion or prescription. But consider for a moment: could your choices be more like available goods on the supermarket shelf, could you enjoy choosing and imagining what you can do with these ingredients.

What are the ingredients that you have available to select for your future life?

We have Biiig heave life-choice-groceries to choose between. I won’t pretend that I have my fear of choosing under control. But I’ll try and think of what we could do as an adventure and I’ll try and not let age be an excuse for giving up. What would I choose if I was 20, 30 or just turned 40? Should I make a choice based on what I might choose in 20 years from now?

Nobody knows where we will be then, metaphysically, historically speaking and in our personal case also: geographically speaking.

Summary:

Treat life choices more like your favourite grocery store experience. Be excited about what is on the shelves. Don’t be afraid of the possibility of empty shelves tomorrow. It could happen but in all likelihood the shelves will still be stocked when you are done with what you pick today and want some fresh choices.

We can have almost everything but definitively not all at once.

(My absolute beginner – of all ages – series of articles of ‘How not to stay poor and instead make money online & with the gig economy’ will continue soon. Check in soon if this is something that interests you. I have nothing to sell at this point but may in the future.)