On life and time

Yes, daily we are bombarded by fluff on social media about how to make our life more happy, rich, this, that, and whatever. There are infinite videos, shorts and blogs and other content on what all we need to do in life to get ahead. But that just makes it easy to fall in the trap of consuming and not producing actions. I wrote about it earlier.

Some evolved souls often use a combination of mental models to tackle life’s small and big problems. But the habit of using mental models takes discipline and time.

Meanwhile, what I have realised is that a very powerful skill (I wont call this a mental model to keep things simple) in dealing with life is the skill of questioning.

Questioning. Simply put it is way to peel the layers from the question or situation standing in front of you. And the real skill is in asking a string of questions which lead to peeling off maximum possible layers and arriving at the bare minimum.

A major problem with exposure to social media is that we start to absorb information (if you can call it that) and lower our ability to doubt or raise apprehensions. We are becoming trained to just accept everything on face value. We start believing things as they are presented in front of us. We lose our ability to differentiate.

But as humans, our very basic nature is curiosity – which is nothing but asking questions such as why something is as it is or what will happen if you do something. But over exposure to ready information curbs our basic curiosity in life.

And yes, it takes energy to raise doubts and become apprehensive. It is far easy to just start accepting everything on face value. Also, by nature, we like to be social and seek acceptance. This means we tend to avoid asking questions, as that means we are disturbing the social equations set around us.

And that is exactly why the quote stands the test of time. Because when you question things around you, and you have the courage to keep questioning, you break the status quo and chart a new path.

That is why the basic skill of questioning everything you see and hear is so important. In fact it is essential to truly understand things as they are at their fundamental levels. It is a life changing habit and I really hope to make it my second nature.