Here is something to tire you out.
Spend the next day (or even half day) considering the “why it is the way it is” notion behind every decision. I bet you’ll hate the exercise.
Challenging every assumption we have is taxing and completely unnecessary. Assumptions are excellent tools for helping us to make decisions and to get things going.
Without the assumption that tomorrow will come, very few things we consider ordinary wouldn’t exist. A day following this one is one of the most rudimentary assumptions we live out of (of course this assumption is largely the luxury of West). I call this type of assumption a building block assumption. Gravity / my best is yet to come / the world is not against me – there are plenty of these and they are like the code to our very own OS – you will find it very challenging to do anything interesting if you haven’t landed on them.
However, many of the assumption we rely on we do so without question. That’s obviously pretty dangerous and for the most part is a product of a culture that doesn’t foster critical thinking (but there’s no time when watching TV is our part-time job).
The dangerous assumptions are ones we take for granted not because we need them to build our notion of reality on but because we have not registered that we have adopted them. For example, the self-bias assumption that has us believe “my experience is like everyone else’s”.
The truth that our human experiences will be and are vastly different seems so obvious – and I bet most readers will put themselves in the not-me group – but our apathy towards the plight of people worse of than ourselves has to be partly caused by our belief that our life experience is the norm. (I know you know this assumption is not actually how things are, but do our lives reflect it’s not true?)
To move in the direction we want our lives to go, we have to first indentify the assumptions we rely upon to help us discern the direction. To get our next piece of work / project / initiative going, we must understand what are our underlying perceptions of how things are around us. This is one of the more challenging ways to get started but it’s also the most direct. Uncovering the assumptions we have subconsciously adopted allows us to reframe what we think is possible – this is incredibly liberating.
From here, if you are prepared to change and adapt in light of what you discover, you are already well on your way.
