Possibility…
When was the last time you genuinely explored it?
Not thought about it. Not simply imagined something “better.” When was the last time you actually full-on explored it?
We often conflate these two questions:
“What’s the best thing to do?”
With: “What is possible?”
Those are very different questions. They pull from different internal systems and frameworks. When you ask the second question too early, you can inadvertently eliminate the life you haven’t yet imagined.
The brain predicts the future using what it’s learned from the past. Our predictions are not a neutral window into possibility. When the future is genuinely uncertain, the things we’ve learned to expect often become the bounds of what we can see.
Your cognitive machinery used to solve for answers in bounded environments doesn’t work in the same way for finding true solutions in unbounded environments. That’s why you can continually try to solve a problem, and frustratingly keep finding yourself in another version of the same problem. You can do all the “right” things, and still feel unsatisfied; stagnant. Stronger, better, more sophisticated strategies of running your cognitive machinery can temporarily feel good, but sometimes make things worse.
So, learning discernment in this regard is an essential skill for feeling alive.
Let’s make this more concrete:
A bounded environment says:
Here is the objective.
Here are the rules.
Here are the constraints.
Here is what success looks like.
Now optimize.
Achievement strategies work beautifully here.
But life and everything involved in living it is unbounded. There are so many variables, and way more possibility than “input-output.”
You can get the promotion and discover you don’t actually want it.
You can build the family and discover you don’t recognize yourself inside of it.
You can become extraordinarily competent and discover that competence has quietly become a prison.
You can keep fixing the relationship while never asking whether the relationship is actually capable of becoming what you need.
You can become very good at coping with a life you don’t actually want.
Then what?
Sometimes the task isn’t making the decision. It’s becoming capable of discerning what the decision is actually about.
Perhaps you’re asking: “How can I organize the demands of my life with the demands of my job?” So you assess known variables: salary, benefits, expected trajectory, commute, culture, risk, alternatives. Useful.
But, what happens when you explore:
What has this job come to mean to me?
What am I afraid would happen if I left?
What part of me comes alive here?
What part of me disappears here?
If I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I get curious about?
What possibility - what life - haven’t I allowed myself to generate because it doesn’t fit the available categories?
Now you’re not merely optimizing a decision. You’re expanding the problem space. You begin to explore possibility. You start playing with the factors that actually impact how you live your life - not simply how you function within it.