You Are Going to Fuck This Up

Figuring out what you want is the central task of adulthood, and it’s not an easy one.

Once you leave formal schooling, you’re catapulted into a world with infinite possibilities. You no longer have to show up at school to avoid detention or ace tests to make your parents proud. You’re finally unshackled from the training wheels of life, and now you... See more

A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important decision of their life.

A very small subset of your decisions are one-way doors. Non-reversible portals into bad realities. These ones should take you more time. They require more information.

In this situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited. For one thing, it’s limited in a retrospective sense, because I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision... See more

Second, Pascal’s Wager. You begin with something that’s obvious. But because it’s hard to accept, you have to keep reminding yourself: We don’t know what’s going to happen with anything, ever, over any period. And so it’s inevitable that a certain percentage of our decisions will be wrong. There’s just no way we can always make the right decision. ... See more