Life on Cruise Control

A striking feature of modern living is how comfortable you can be without being intentional. This applies everywhere, from second to second, day to day, year to year, and decade to decade. You can spend all the seconds in a day scrolling through social media with little thought, and you can spend an entire successful career, from kindergarten to retirement, working hard at reaching the next milestone without ever actively choosing it.

Each video you scroll through and each step of your career is also wildly underdetermined. We’re no longer in a world where you need to actively decide what book, or even what show, you are going to watch next. We’re even further away from the world of “my dad was a plumber, and my dad’s dad was a plumber, so I’m going to be a plumber.”

At the small scale, we’ve done an amazing job figuring out how to remove the friction from finding something pleasant to occupy your time. At the large scale, we’ve done an amazing job smoothing the boundaries between jobs to make it easy to coast through a career. In the same way that your social media feed is largely determined by the handful of pieces of content you engaged with early on, somewhat serendipitously, entire careers are shaped by a few random jostles early on in school.

All of this is like cruise control on a highway. You can reach high velocity with minimal input, but, like a good drive, the most engaging parts of life are off the highway, where decisions need to be made. This conditioning makes finding those engaging moments feel impossible or even wrong.

It’s common to think that good relationships should be natural and not require effort. That is completely backwards, and it leads us to deprive ourselves of the opportunity to have meaningful relationships. The same logic applies to other life decisions: asking someone out, deciding to marry, having kids, buying a house, starting a business. These are all things that will rarely feel like the natural time to do them, and so life gets delayed.