How To Not Waste Your Life

Question everything.

Everything.

Do not take anything as absolute fact. Dig deeper. Define for yourself what it means to be happy, fulfilled, successful, loving, loved. Do not assume another person or group’s belief system as yours without questioning the foundation of their beliefs. Do not be complacent in your education of the world and all the varying aspects of it. Do not fix your views so completely that you do not give way for the digestion of new information. Do not allow your life’s groundwork to be laid upon views, beliefs, and knowledge that you have not personally allowed to be your stability. Examine everything you take automatically as truth and hold it up to the microscope to determine its purity, its place amongst your life.

Think of your life like a brand new apartment in which you have no furnishings for yet. Every piece you bring into your apartment is curated and added into your daily living space based on deliberate, conscious decisions. You ask yourself, is this something I want to look at every day? You can think of your belief system, your knowledge, in much the same way. Add knowledge into your life deliberately. Curate what gets to run through your mind daily.

Furthermore, question yourself. Question the story you have about yourself which runs on repeat, the story which dictates your behavior. Self-awareness is power. You become stronger, braver, more of a force when you become aware of your world and your self. Refuse to allow your life to be run on mindless autopilot. Become almost obsessively interested in the source of your own thoughts and beliefs. And, let go those personal beliefs which do not serve your highest self.

Is this an easy thing to do? No. Is this a lifelong journey? Of course. But, why allow your life to be lived while asleep? Why allow yourself to not show up every day with a questioning, agile, curious mind?

When you don’t show up to your life curiously, you become routinized, monotonous, flat, and repetitious. I’ve never met someone who desires this, who does not want to extract a more pure, joyful, loving experience from life. Is it easier to tune out and kill time? Sure. But, is that really how you want to live? You watch the clock tick by long enough without a conscious effort to be present and live deliberately, you will wonder where the time went, why nothing was enjoyed and all your best memories are behind you (or realized or seen in retrospect). Be an active participant in your life and you will never feel as though you have wasted much of anything.