Caerus

Last time I raved about the intrinsic meaninglessness of words and the consequent need to take action.

Today I want to talk about choices. 

Obviously we make choices every day. Thousands of choices. What do I want to eat in the morning? Do I even eat in the morning? What should I wear today? Am I going to class or should I skip? Should I meet with friends or with my significant other?

Of course not all choices are created equal. Some are trivial, some important. Some require no brain power whatsoever, and they shouldn't, as that only impedes normal functioning. Others require and should require much thought.

It barely matters if you eat oatmeal or toast for breakfast. This choice has almost no influence on your life. Choices that matter are those that influence your life in the long-term or those that influence more people than just you.
 

What all choices, however, have in common is that fact that we, in my eyes (I am willing to discuss this with each and everyone of you), act only according to what we truly want most. Consequently, we can, at any given instant, only want one thing. Everything else we say we want is nothing we truly want but instead something that would merely be “nice to have”. 

This is a very simplistic perspective. You might say that sometimes you want more than one thing. Say for example you want a shower and a nice meal. It is (almost) impossible to do these two things at the same time, so you will eat first and then take a shower. What you decided to do first is what you truly wanted in that moment. The shower you can also truly want now that the meal is out of your head.

You might also say that you truly want one thing but end up doing another thing. A classic example: You know you should do homework but you also have the option to scroll through social media. Now I highly doubt any of you actually truly want to do the homework, so it should come as no surprise that often enough we use our phones to keep our minds occupied. 

But, you might ask, what if I am to decide between two important things that I actually care about? 

An example from my life: It is the break, I would normally go home but a close friend has offered me to visit his home. I know my family would be really happy to see me, because I haven’t been around in a while. On the other hand, I know going with my friends would deepen your friendship, and I would get to see an interesting country. I thought about this for a while, my thoughts going back and forth, weighing the pros and cons of the two options. Finally, I decided for one of the two. I am not going to tell what I ended up doing but I chose the one I wanted more. This is the one I truly wanted.

My point is that we only do the things we want to do. And we should do so with a sense of agency, a sense of responsibility. I want you, dear reader, to take extreme ownership of your world, quit blaming things outside of you. If we find the strength within, few things can rock our boat more than we can handle.

Take care of yourselves.