Note (26 Jun 2026): I’ve updated this recently. The original version presented each decision heuristic on equal footing. However, my accumulated life experience has taught me that some heuristics are better than others: they incorporate more relevant information, more attuned to your experience in the world, and perhaps with more realistic assumptions about human nature and the nature of our existence.
Some questions to ask yourself when confonted with major decisions about your life.
Unfolding + https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding
and thinking, coupled with creating the feeling you desire now (instead of it being a future feeling when you get xyz outcome) works. https://x.com/sam_allsopp_/status/1979190622167646446vvv
Listen to your inner compass
Folk psychology names many concepts related to this: “gut feeling”, “deepest impulse”, “instinct”, “intuition”. Everyone has it, to some extent, but listening to it is a practiced skill. The less one listens to it, the less attuned or desensitized one becomes. The more one listens to it, the more alive and free one feels.
Instead, quite a lot of people seem to listen to their “thoughts”. Thoughts can be useful and powerful, but they are different from one’s inner compass.
Thoughts take the form of voices in your head. Narratives, conversations, rules, checklists, reasons and judgements are all thoughts. Thoughts are moulded by recent experiences, working memory, and confirmation bias, shaped by comformity and convention, by your acquired vocabulary, by habit. Judgements, for example, often form when one is avoiding certain negative emotions like fear or anger or jealousy or envy. If you’re always inhabiting your thoughts, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. “I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m frozen out of my body” If these voices in your head are too loud, it can obscure the fine, sensitive hum of the inner compass.
What is the nature of the inner compass? Is it the same as listening to your body, or feelings and emotions? Not quite.
If I tap into my body and it wants fast food and sugar, or laze around in bed all day to watch Netflix, or exit in a panic when an investment goes down, is that the way? And if I don’t want to go to the gym or prepare for the interview, should I not?
Craving or addiction impulses are urgent, demanding, and usually just want quick pleasure. An addiction or “unvirtuous” impulse tells me that I am unaligned: my brain and my underlying emotions do not match up. Craving is often an escape and is a form of disconnecting from the underlying body sensation.
One’s body is like a toddler: it always has a point about how you feel, but it doesn’t always have the best answer for less immediate concerns. For example, sometimes the body feeling is feeling like this situation has been “put on me” is part of what makes me want to rebel, like i’m losing my agency, which has been so preciously cultivated. The inner compass or true self tends to be steady, considers your long-term wellbeing, and isn’t pushy. There’s a felt sense of ease, joy, acceptance, resolve that accompanies it. The inner compass is visceral. It feels like freedom. It comes from your free and unhindered will. It is honed with inquisitiveness, curiosity, integrity, and presence. It contains the seed of the expression of your finest insticts of your higher self.
The body is our medium for soul and spirit channels of information. The signals always mean something important, even if not what you think they mean
Some examples of my own life:
And it is abundant. The inner compass exists in the space and life beyond thoughts. It is vast and infinitely more expansive than the mind’s ability to think.
Wisdom of my body or cravings of the body of a toddler? Flowing with the tao or drifting lazily without priorities? The expression of your highest self or an addictive impulse?
Could someone have bad intuition? Could instinct lead you to bad places?
Trauma short-circuits the development of healthy, accurate intuition
Here are some questions:
Is it intrinsically meaningful?
Are you doing it because of extrinsic reasons or social validation? What is your benchmark for social proof - is it your immediate circle, national, or international?
Why is it meaningful? Is it intrinsically meaningful?
Some of the opportunities I have walked away from: BRCA GSec elections, any event management gigs, jobs in finance, was because they were not inrinsically meaninful and social validation wasn’t important to me.
Does this express who I am?
Some decisions are not a matter of what leads to a better outcome or what does not, but instead are expression of identity (“this is who I am!”)
Do you just want clarity, fun, aliveness, meaning in the moment?
Speak to yourself in the third person
When faced with a difficult problem one trick is to ask how you would view your choice in hindsight a year later. I’m able to make clearer judgments about situations, when someone else is going through them. It’s much harder when I’m the subject of the story. Your mental context is so much more developed when you’re thinking about yourself (not in the 3rd person). You have skin in the game, maybe it’s that you’re worried about the outcome of the situation, or it’s just stressing you out, or you’re thinking about how it will affect your friends/family/the rest of your life. So when you view it from an outsider’s perspective, and throw away all that mental “noise”, you have a clearer head and can make better decisions with the long-term in mind. Alternatively, if you’re going through something, you could try imagining someone else in the same situation (make up someone if you have to). What advice would you give to them? Then use that advice for yourself.
This is a bit like being your own “inner parent”.
Does this express who I am?
Some decisions are not a matter of what leads to a better outcome or what does not, but instead are expression of identity (“this is who I am!”)
Separate the idea of something from the lived experience of it
There’s a difference in having something and looking like we have the thing. There’s a difference between what you like, and what you’d like to like; between love, and the idea of love; being aware, and being aware that you are aware. One is the the map, the other, the territory.
This is similar to not following a grand plan and a vision.
Some examples:
The experience of actual programming something is quite different from the romantic vision of a hacker.
Living the life of a nomad travelling around the world seems enticing. But visualising yourself at awesome places is a fantasy where you usually leave out your own inner psychology: imagine as you are, right now. If you were transported to your dream vacation place, would you be happy? Imagine the anxieties you will feel: being jobless and aimless in life and not adding meaning to anyone else’s, of not making a lasting impression on the world etc. Who would take care of your family? Does it still seem enticing?
Seperate the feeling of lived experience from the memory of it
There is a difference between the remembering experience and lived experience. If something was not enjoyable, do you want to do it despite suffering?
“I don’t like writing, but I loved having written”
What were the experiences of other people who followed this path?
Preemptively avoid the mistakes they made. As an example, this is how I decided against academia.
Update: A caveat with this heuristic: You are not other people. And when you compare yourself to others, you lose all the rich information about your unique circumstances, life trajectory, goals and personality that needs to be fed into the decision. In hindsight, I am not sure my decision against academia was a good one in 2022.
On the other hand, learning from friends’ experience would have helped me a better understanding of how fundraising works.
What are the worst criticisms of doing this?
Does the things that can hold itself against the worst criticisms that you would come up with?
Update: I would not recommend this now.
What are you giving up?
Life is tragic. There are opportunity costs.
Let’s say you have to make a decision about what job offer to accept. If you take up a career in, say management consulting or trading firm with gruelling work hours, what would you be giving up? Would you find time to pursue hobbies like writing and music? Or spending time with your loved ones? Would missing out on all these for the money and prestige be worth it?
In your old age, would I regret the time spent on this?
What is your legacy going to be? What are the stories people are going to tell when you’re gone? What is your obituary going to say? Is there anything to say at all? If not, what would you like it to say? How can you start working towards that today?
What’s true about you today that would make your 8-Year-Old Self cry?
The funny thing though, is that if my 8-year-old self asked my 20-year-old self, “Why don’t you write anymore?” and I replied, “Because I’m not good at it,” or “Because nobody would read what I write,” or “Because you can’t make money doing that,” not only would I have been completely wrong, but that eight-year-old-boy version of me would have probably started crying. That eight-year-old boy didn’t care about Google traffic or social media virality or book advances. He just wanted to play. And that’s where passion always begins: with a sense of play.
Man reveals how chosing comfort in his 20s led to a life of emptiness and pain
Whenever you are making a consequential decision, write down what you decided, why you decided as you did, what you expect to happen, and if you’re so inclined, how you feel mentally and physically.
Writing itself makes you realize where there are holes in things. The analysis part of you kicks in when you sit down [to write]… You think, “Oh, that can’t be right.” And you have to go back, and you have to rethink it all.
How we make decisions at coinbase?
Accept reality as a gift. You don’t know anything.
Lastly, maybe just stop taking decisions so seriously. Just go with anything.
I was incredibly sad about my first job out of college - which was not my first choice, but by accepting it I walked into a gold mine of friendships that I wouldn’t have found had my elaborately thought out plans worked out.
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