One of the keys to living well is to not to worry about things that may or may not happen in the future, and as a result end up planning too far ahead and then replanning as things change.

Planning can be beneficial in a business sense, but even there it is fraught with a lack of reliable predictions, and the same is true for your life. You may be able to guess what will happen based on past experience for the short term, but life itself is not rational or procedural and there are so many variables to consider that the future is basically chaos.

Worrying then about what might happen in a chaotic future is pointless as you cannot predict it reliably, and that worry and hand wringing over plans; is going to rob you of your happiness now, and your health and wellbeing in the future.

They say you should only worry about things that are in your control, and as the vast majority of life is chaos, you really cannot control anything more than how you react to situations presented to you. I suppose the other thing to do would be to train yourself to be able to handle random changes in your life, without them making you anxious or fearful. Feeling confident that you can handle anything that life throws at you is such a positive skill to acquire.

Having said that there is no benefit in living impulsively and based on your emotions. Part of the chaos is a turbulent maelstrom of emotion that can get tugged around by people and events. One must try to live strategically and goal oriented without the detail of everything known, kind of like a person trying to cross a busy road.

You must understand the gross task and the goal without getting carried away with the type detail like the cost of the fuel used by the type of cylinders in an engine, for the model of car that is about to hit you!

There is a common human behaviour pattern to become an expert in a narrow field, and to pigeon hole oneself there for safety. These types will learn everything they can about a problem and its background, but never actually act on their learning, save for teaching others. These experts will attack others who are not experts in their narrow field, when they step out of their perceived lane to perform an act themselves.

This is a very bad human facet and it causes stagnation and inaction in people, these expert types may be reveared for their knolwedge and ability to predict but they have no practical experience, such that they are like a toddler who has eaten a dictionary, they lack the ability themselves to make a move out of their comfort zones. So ultimately their expertise is like a historians knowledge of what went before.

You will also find people who will sell you a fiction of the world as tightly controlled and rigid structure, and it all being part of some god-like group’s control over everything. You will find them everywhere in life as the thought of our human experience being out of control is scary to many. So the media, the government, your boss, family and friends may all align with a fictional belief, to hide themselves from the chaos of reality.

As part of our social human contract, we manage each other so that no-one strays too far from the establishment point of view. Thinking for one’s self is bad as it might contradict the cohesion of the group, so a shared delusion develops that is hard to change, even with evidential facts.

There is an interesting pattern that emerges in established groups that allows them to maintain their position and shun alternate views, until the chaos becomes to much for them to deny, and then they absorb it like it was always the case. It goes a little like this:

• That’s not real, you are a looney for thinking it
• It is not happening, you are acting dangerously to believe otherwise
• It might be happening, but we won’t be affected
• It is happening and it’s actually a good thing for us
• This is always what was going to happen, there is no other way, and anyone who says otherwise is bad

The above can easily be accomplished within the bounds of good manners and polite conversation. While this is a heinous thing to do to people, it is regularly done and is allowed to be carried out for the sake of the greater good and the grand narrative.

You may be tempted to trade the truth for one of these fictions, which require little effort to consume as so many others believe the same thing, you would do this because your stance in truth causes the masses to reject you. However, living strategically often requires that you do not follow the herd, and you do not pretend to fit in for the sake of an easy life.
Others look to the pack for safety, I run from it as dangerously controlling.

Happiness in this scenario can be acquired briefly from the praise of your peers, but this is a drug that keeps you tied to those others. True happiness comes from within, and from living in the present, from not worrying about what will be in the future, and not being a slave to your past and historical transgressions.

So don’t trade the truth for the comfort of fitting in, and don’t worry about other people and their games, they are illusions.

I always tell people to metaphorically learn to swim without knowing where the land is, to control each movement as you make it, and this way you are calm and using minimal effort to float while still trusting that you are moving with purpose towards an unseen goal. If you worry too much about your lack of movement or the missing land on the horizon, you could easily put all your effort into swimming furiously in circles and never reaching your goal, then potentially exhausting yourself and possibly drowning too.

So, to conclude; don’t plan to far ahead, you may end up doing awful things to preserve the perceived correctness of a plan, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This will rob you of your happiness and inject a large amount of stress into your life that can cause you health issues.

Instead stay in the moment and focus only on what you can control. Ultimately your authenticity is more valuable to us all than the acceptance of a comforting lie.