Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
“The most important thing is to enjoy your life – to be happy – it’s all that matters.” ~ Audrey Hepburn
It is critical to prioritize the things that matter to your existence.
Prioritization has always been important. But never more so than now. This ability must be understood to merit a new level of significance, as the volume of the world we live in has grown uncontrollably, automated and accelerated by modern technology.
An Existential Crisis
It is an existential crisis that you are up against, if you realize that your “existence” needs to be carved out from the vast expanse around you that you call “my world”, which is a clumsy mix of real things inextricably entangled with meaningless nonsense. A way to get this at a deeper level is to visualize yourself throwing a dart into the murk around you. Can you have confidence that the dart will land on something that is essential to your existence? Or is it more likely that it will find a home in something that is either completely nonsense or something that’s “meh”?
Sense and Nonsense
There is indeed a considerable amount of nonsense out there. Much of it is just “word soup” and “number soup” that you have accepted as being as real as real things that actually exist. And it is not just words and numbers and other symbolic constructs that confuse matters; it’s also “logic”!
Unfortunately, what is called “logic” is anything but. There are many indoctrinated cause-effect and other supposedly meaningful connections among the real and imagined things inside the recesses of your mind. If these “logical” things have been taught from the cradle onwards, and repeated incessantly by almost everyone you have met, everywhere, you have likely accepted and embedded these in your mind in a way that feels native and correct.
But surely! Surely, everyone cannot be wrong at the same time? If we could somehow visit and ask Galileo, he would probably answer this with, “Oh yes, my friends, they absolutely can”. Taking a more modern example, did everything everyone asserted during the Covid times, with intense passion, sometimes even with red faces, turn out to be right? How many of these things were wrong? And how many were grievously wrong?
Finessing Nonsense
Unfortunately, nonsense cannot be completely avoided. It is everywhere around you, and some of it has also seeped deep inside you, lodging there almost permanently.
The best that can be done is to “finesse”. In the card game of Bridge, a “finesse” is an attempt to win with a card that is not inherently a guaranteed winner. But if the cards are played thoughtfully in the right sequence, it is possible to increase the probability of winning.
In real life, too, you can’t always see the lie of the cards around you. You will have partial and incorrect information, sometimes even misinformation. So, like a skilled bridge player, you consider probabilities that are based on not committing to one view of the world that could be completely incorrect; you stay open to different possibilities. And you tease out reasonable probabilities in this game of chance. You play certain cards at certain times, and in a certain sequence. Sometimes, you don’t play some cards at all!
Priorities, Priorities, Priorities!
Life is full of choices. You don’t have to do everything and make it all part of your existence. Yes, sometimes you may feel as if there is no choice with certain things. But people have done things that have felt difficult at the time they did it – people have walked out of bad jobs, bad marriages and other situations, throwing themselves into the great unknown. They did these things because they decided to prioritize something else that they saw as being more meaningful and essential to their existence.
You can too! Unless you suffer from “priorititis”, the inability to exercise choice. In that case, the universe, which includes other people, will make the choice for you. Sometimes, that is not a bad strategy, if it is a conscious one. The universe moves too, not just you. And you cannot always make the right choices when you don’t know which way the universe will move from its current orientation.
One very important kind of choice is the choice to lose. Taking what you consider to be a “loss” is hard. But, often, big wins in the important things in life can come from a willingness to take losses in the things that don’t matter as much. And when you are able to cast out those things that don’t really matter, you shrink your “existence” and make it much more meaningful. There is an unexpected side effect from this: you will need to make fewer choices in the smaller existence you create for yourself.
So, don’t suffer from priorititis – it can be a debilitating disease!
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. Contact: [email protected].
