For most of human history, people had a few options. There was only so much choice. People farmed, hunted, gathered, raised kids, survived winter, enjoyed summer, and repeated the process every year. Humans lived almost the same way for generations. Survival made the choices for them. People were more concerned with “how not to die.” A lot has changed. Civilisation has improved the survival game. Life isn’t just about staying alive. Choosing how to live is now more demanding for our brains. Choices have exploded. Now you can be anything. Learn anything. Move anywhere. Talk to everyone. Compare yourself to millions. You can pursue a hundred paths at once. It feels like freedom. But it can also feel like decision paralysis.
Choice overload is real.
And it can overwhelm your brain.
When options increase, satisfaction drops. Barry Schwartz studied this years ago. “The secret to happiness is low expectations,” he said. More choice doesn’t make you happier. It makes you anxious. You second-guess yourself. You delay. You regret paths you never even took. A lot more paths you could have taken make you regret your present life. My question right now is: what should we be doing to live our best lives? How do we live? And what should you ignore?
First of all, stop trying to optimise your entire life. You can’t. No one can plan the whole year. And get things done exactly as they wanted. You don’t need a 365 life plan. You don’t need to have it figured out. No one does. Anyone who says they do is either selling something or lying to themselves. Living well right now means choosing consciously and reducing distractions. Again and again. You need a direction that’s “good enough.” We are not wired to optimise in a continuous cycle. We’re wired to adapt. Because things don’t always go as planned. Studies on happiness found something surprising. After big wins or losses, people return to their default happiness levels. Even for lottery winners.
It’s the same pattern.
Your brain normalises. So if you’re waiting to figure out life or your best path, you’ll wait forever. What you can focus on is asking the right questions. What gives me more energy? What paths drain my soul? What kind of problems do I like solving? Who do I respect, and why? Not just what makes the most money. Not what looks impressive. What feels right for you? Decide what you’re willing to be bad at. You can’t do everything. Not even close. Every yes is a no to a thousand more options. And the most peaceful people I know made this choice early. They picked a few things that matter to them. Then they let themselves be average at the rest. Research on deliberate practice proved this.
Be so good at a few things and ignore the rest.
Focus is the secret. Not multitasking. Focus. That means neglecting other areas on purpose. So choose. You can be great at teamwork and bad at emails. Or creative and bad at team bonding. Some people can get all the hard things done. But be less ambitious. There’s no neutral option. There’s just what works for you. Get practical, daily. Stop dwelling on your dreams so much. Big life questions feel overwhelming because they’re abstract. Your life is happening right now. Do what you must today. With the system that makes you do your best work right now. Repeated enough, they will get you closer to your goal. Environment beats motivation.
You won’t rise to your goals this year.
You will fall to your systems. Want to read more? Put a book where your phone usually sits. Want to be calmer with better clarity. Go to bed earlier. Seriously. Sleep deprivation takes a toll on our brains. And makes emotional regulation worse. Build better daily defaults. Don’t confuse multiple choices with endless possibilities. Practical freedom comes from commitment. From saying, This matters to me, and letting the rest go. Pick something worth caring about. Then take the next best small step.
Lock yourself into systems now.
Be prepared to run more experiments. And remember, experiments are allowed to fail. Build skills that compound. Boring but effective skills run your life. Learn to write clearly. It improves thinking. Learn to manage your emotions. It will save your relationships. Learn basic finance. It secures peace of mind. Learn how to learn.
It future-proofs you. These don’t go out of style. They stack over time. Like interest, you don’t notice until it’s huge. Meaning comes from responsibility. It has nothing to do with pleasure on loop. Pleasure is temporary.
Always. Dopamine spikes, then drops. What lasts is meaning. Viktor Frankl figured this out in the worst conditions imaginable. Modern psychology agrees. People with responsibility toward people, work, or values are more satisfied in life.
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose,” says Frankl.
Now the questions that will help you get meaning. Who depends on me? What would be worse if I didn’t exist? What am I willing to suffer for? Those answers change everything. Learn how to think, not what to think. Your biggest advantage right now isn’t information. It’s judgment. Better knowledge.
It’s also the ability to connect the dots. You’re drowning in advice. Podcasts. Threads. Experts contradicting experts. Everyone wants attention. Psychologist and economist Herbert Simon said, “… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
The skill that matters is knowing what not to absorb. What to ignore. And the mental models that can help you find clarity. Simple frameworks for understanding the world help people make better decisions under uncertainty. Not IQ. Not raw intelligence. Models.
Learn a few.
Opportunity cost: every choice costs something. Regression to the mean: extreme results are temporary. Incentives: people respond to what rewards them, not what they say they value. Use them daily, and you’ll avoid years of confusion. And of course, make room for doubt and wonder. You’re allowed to not know.
You’re allowed to change your mind. You’re allowed to feel awe. Don’t pack your life with too many goals you can’t achieve. Some of the best experiences in life are unplanned.
Don’t over schedule/over-optimise. Don’t explain yourself too fast. Let some things stay unfinished. And then come back to them with a fresh perspective. There’s no single way to live. A good life is not an experience you can solve. It’s a practice. You wake up. You choose again. Some days you choose well.
Other days you don’t. You adjust. You keep going. What matters isn’t that you picked the “right” path. It’s that the path is yours. Chosen on purpose. And lived from the inside for yourself. When you feel stuck, ask better questions. What would make today more alive? Do that.
You don’t need more certainty.
You need more presence. More courage to commit to better things. More patience with yourself while you figure it out. In 2026, live deliberately while others get addicted to speed.