Boredom World 4: You can't "do anything", so do what you can

In Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade she recalls a client who tells her that whenever he tries to think about what he wants to do with his life, he feels “lost in the ocean”, no land in sight, no sense of direction. His whole life he had been told he could “do anything” and now he was suffering for it.

After all, if your options are infinite, then surely any concrete path you may consider is inferior to some other option you’ve not yet thought of. The result is this sense of being lost in the middle of the ocean, which is really referring to a lack of environmental anisotropy. Everything looks the same, because nothing is good enough when your options are infinite – you can’t see land in any direction you look.

This is the result of an overload of choices, leading to an inability to make a decision.

She explains to him:

“You’ve spent more than two decades shaping who you are. You have experiences, interests, strengths, weaknesses, diplomas, hang-ups, priorities. You didn’t just this moment drop onto the planet or, as you put it, into the ocean. The past twenty-five years are relevant. You’re standing in front of six flavors of jam and you know something about whether you prefer kiwi or black cherry.”¹

Eventually she gets him to come up with some reasonable options available to him given where he is at now, with his history, experience, and interests. This is a clear win: constraints can help us come up with creative solutions. Within our model in this blogchain, it is using the client’s history and current location as an orientation, filtering the landscape of possibilities to a more reasonable, local set.

But it still isn’t enough.

When the client considers these options, they feel mundane compared to his prior prospects of being able to “do anything”. They feel too ordinary. And none of them really jump out at him as better than the others.

So we see that, at least in this case, an orientation would ideally be more than just a filter producing a short-list of items from a larger, more overwhelming set. It would also provide a framework for weighing and comparing those items.

For some, such a framework can be provided by a strong sense of moral duty or beliefs about the state of the world, as Nate Soares refers to in his replacing guilt series. But even then, as a fickle individual human, the actual goal or value system driving you may not always be perfectly transparent. The good news is that because the role of an orientation is only to provide a sense of direction, there is no need to fully comprehend the destination.² A strong sense of direction is enough to allow you to weigh and compare the available options (and stop feeling lost in the middle of the ocean).

If you’re still unsure, a way to go about finding a suitable orientation may be to evaluate the work you’ve done in the past, selecting the work you enjoyed the most, or found the most fulfilling. Given this list, you can try to find the through-line that unites them all. Again, I think it would be a mistake to try to be too specific – the orientation should be open-ended and general so as to be adaptable. If you’ve primarily worked in a particular, specific area, but are open to branching out, it makes sense that your work in that area is more of a microcosm of the more general pattern that underlies your orientation.

Given that the orientation serves as an interpretive framework – a unified understanding of what you are trying to do – it can also be used to interpret the work you have now, assuming you are currently working. That is to say, the orientation can be used to help guide your current work decisions. Indeed, we previously talked about Richard Hamming’s orientation toward doing great work. He points out that it may be possible to reframe the work you already have to make it more important and more consequential. And likewise, you can use your orientation to reframe or reinterpret the work you already have to be more meaningful by being more aligned with your orientation.

As a final note it is worth remembering that the orientation is only one component of what is a dynamic system. It should be anything but static across a lifetime. As your scaffolding of experiences and priorities shifts, as your environment changes, the interpretive framework you use to evaluate opportunities and make decisions should also change.

With that having been said, the value of having an explicit orientation in your mind right now is that it is a powerful tool for introspection. Once you have an orientation that feels properly aligned, it can be used to make concrete decisions in ways that are also aligned. It can be used to clarify your desires. It can be used to determine concrete goals. And thus for those that struggle to understand or determine their goals or desires, finding such an orientation can be immensely valuable. Goals and desires are downstream of orientation. So find one.

Notes¶