I’m not informed enough to have a strong opinion on this — how often do you hear that?

how different would our society be if people were not trying to fend off uncertainty with the illusion of knowledge?

• how would state propaganda work?
• what would social media influencers talk about?
• how do politicians get elected now?
• would twitter collapse?
• do we take the responsibility of making decisions with insufficient data? or do we search for some other escape?

when you think of it, borrowing opinions is both an ancient survival mechanism and one of the biggest hurdles facing human society today. instead of fighting symptoms with counter-opinions, we must challenge the very culture of easy opining.

I start by telling my kids “I don’t know” more often. I try to get words like assumption, verify, bias into their vocabulary.

How do you do it?

a book nobody wants to read.

teacher: kids, who do you want to become?
kid 1: an astronaut!
kid 2: a rock star!
kid 3: I want to go to the grocery 5,000 times, wash dishes 12,000 times, barely meet 600 deadlines, and spend my life wondering where it all went wrong.

if movies / books / stories / gossip were like real life, who would want to spend money on that? we are suckers for good stories because they allow us to temporarily escape the cages we build through negligence. a path to a lesser goal is so clear our legs walk it on their own. all while our heads are happily constructing complex dreams, narratives, and unlikely situations we want to find ourselves in.

the world doesn’t care about narratives; it debunks them one by one. your life doesn’t want to be a story; you miss its essence while anxiously searching for one story after another.

happiness isn’t something hollywood can show you. you don’t get to discover it until your 10th try. and then it turns out to be in the place you neglected all along — yourself.

do I have a point? I don’t know. this doesn’t have to be a story.

starting up is praised. everybody encourages you to start something new — a business, a hobby, a relationship.

rarely does it even get acknowledged that for a new start you usually have to stop something first: quit the job you hate, break up with a negative person, let go of life-long fears. the most difficult part gets little attention.

stopping is important but tricky, because most starts in life are unconscious. picking up bad habits is easy; little compromises are invisible; urgent over important feels natural. stopping, on the other hand, requires alert and going against the flow. when you need to stop something and it’s hard, it may mean there was an easy start in the past.

finally, you don’t only stop to start something again. stopping is a practice; it’s a cure. getting rid of something to make room is a good deal in itself. removing things that no longer make sense brings clarity and insights you don’t get otherwise.

starting is about dreams, enthusiasm, impatience, pivots, impulse.

stopping is about reality, reflection, acknowledgment, analysis, conscience.

stop more often than you start.

a common problem is we don’t notice when we are genuinely confused.

parents taught us to be fearless, but never admitted that nobody in their right mind could be fearless. they were setting us up for failure. thus, instead of not fearing anything, we learned to hide fears.

somehow, hiding fear from others became hiding it from ourselves. through the practice of hiding fear we stopped noticing it.

we prefer knee-jerk reactions to confusion: keeping a poker face or smiling, nodding, and jabbing at the next obvious thing without stopping for a second. it became a habit to the extent that self-help writers teach us to “schedule time for strategic thinking“. this is sad because it reveals the autopilot mode that we have to learn to turn off.

so, to practice confusion awareness I started saying things like “I’m confused,” “I have no idea what’s going on,” “I’m lost” out loud. I figured I first need to be more aware of how I react to reality not meeting my expectations.

you can’t fix your wrong reactions to confusion until you defeat the control freak in you. it’s ok to have goals and plans but that requires equal understanding that the world doesn’t work according to your primitive models.

every once in a while, just watch how life unfolds before you. it’s less painful than insisting that it obeys your batch of orders, a.k.a. todo list.