Part of what I endeavor to do is deconstruct life and develop practical frameworks for re-constructing YOUR life in order to live the life you truly want. Today I’ve been writing about what I call a Directed Life. It’s the term I use for building a life plan.
But each time I get too technical about planning your life – life components, balance, sequencing, blah, blah, blah – I keep coming back to a simple trap of life. A trap that the happiness literature clearly points out but each day many of us stumble into – that we don’t know what we want in the future.
In fact the research suggests that we aren’t even good at knowing what has made us happy in the past, let alone projecting what will make us happy in the future. So the best we can do is know what makes us happy today and get this – look at what makes other people happy in their future.
So when all this planning gets a little dense for me I remind myself that we never really know what we want. And we certainly don’t know how we will feel about it in the future. Then I tell myself that the best we can do is know what we want at each point in time. Then figure out how to live it.
So I’m going for a motorcycle ride. I’ll figure out what I want in the future when I get back to it.