How you treat every aspect of your life can be characterized on a spectrum from fully passive to fully intentional. Each aspect of each person’s life will fall somewhere on this spectrum, and where you choose to be in each will make an enormous difference in your life.
Passive action is going with the flow. It is like putting a canoe in the river and allowing it to drift wherever the current takes it. While this may indeed be easier, it guarantees you will not arrive where you want to go. The reality of the situation is worse still. Passive action is neither as innocuous or as beneficial as coasting a canoe downstream.
Passive action is to act according to feelings, and your feelings will lead to substantially worse options than rational thought. Reality is very complex. You can’t find your way to a destination that involves navigating obstacles without intent. If you are optimizing subconsciously, you are also optimizing suboptimally. Not only will you aim at worse things, you will shift arbitrarily between multiple unrelated targets each and every day, vastly restricting the resources you have to achieve even the few aims you will have under reduced intentionality. Recall the prior analogy: Thinking that random action seasoned by human nature will produce outcomes even nearly as good as those produced through honest intention is even more foolish than expecting to hit the bullseye in a game of darts when you are blindfolded and spinning in a chair. Reality is very complex. You can’t find your way to a destination that involves navigating obstacles without intent.
Rational thought is like traveling to a predetermined destination in a canoe, paddling, steering, and navigating to intentionally traverse obstacles to get there. Operating from an attitude of intentional reason, you can both more clearly enumerate the available options for action and more accurately assess the cost and benefit of each, resulting in a much higher likelihood of a much better decision than operating merely on emotion.
The more explicit you make your actions, feelings, and thoughts, the more you can apply reason in choosing what you do. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”1
Footnotes
- 1. This quote is often attributed to Carl Jung, but its actual author is unknown. It appears to be a paraphrase of a much less clear or succinct statement by Jung: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” ↩