Why it’s aversive to attempt to sit down and reason through plans, like “should I work full-time or part-time”, vs the alternative of following aliveness/what currently feels true (where the failure mode is falling for recency bias, missing flaws in my reasoning that I eventually spot, which cause me to pivot)

1. Fears

Fear of failure

There’s a sense of “what if I never get to an answer”
Like, there’s a kind of fixed mindset, afraid of failure thing, that blocks me from wanting to try
Like, to make a decision here, it feels like there are so many facets, and so much uncertainty
Which comes back to the enneagram 3 core fear of failure!

Efficiency, using time well, etc
So, if there’s an initial sense of “this won’t work”, then there’s a concurrent feeling of “oh god, I can’t waste my time on something that won’t work!”
I think this is a core reason for my lack of systematic thinking in the past - a sense that it isn’t possible anyway
- Like, even if I do the elenchus a bunch, and do rationalist techniques etc, won’t there always be some uncertainty? As you can’t get to 100% certainty. And even if you feel like you’re like 80% certain, what if you’re missing something crucial, and in a few months you’ll have a huge pivot?

One of my key neuroses is a fear of wasting time, of not having enough time, of being behind, etc etc
So, a fear for me re: asking thorough questions (re: e.g. my plans) is that maybe it’ll never end, and/or maybe it won’t be fruitful, and as such, I’ll have wasted time
I’m action-oriented to a fault → I’d much rather get stuck in on a project, rather than planning, pre-morteming, sense-checking the plan, the reasoning, the rationale, etc
- But, paradoxically, not stress-checking things can lead to huge amounts of wasted time! If you jump on the first project that seems like a good fit, 4 months could pass before you realise that one of the initial premises were flawed. That’s a much bigger loss than taking, let’s say, an extra week in the planning/stress checking phase!

Right now, I have the lowest amount of cumulative knowledge that I’ll ever have
Over time, I may converge on some things that feel like Popperian truths, whilst always testing them
So yes, right now I do feel relatively lost and uncertainty, but this is the start of the journey

Let’s say I spend 2, 5, 10 hours thinking through a decision
I’d be very surprised if I made 0 progress. If I didn’t reach a point of “ok, I think I’ve spotted everything - no doubt I’ve missed some stuff, but I feel relatively happy with what I’ve uncovered, and now feel like I’m making a more informed decision”

I have an intuitive sense that it could be very powerful to take whatever problem I’m thinking through and think about it from a few different POVs. What would this person say, that person? Etc. And maybe use the elenchus too

Dreyfus skill hierarchy: a beginner has to do things in a very rigid, rule based way, dutifully plodding through a variety of different stages
An expert has an intuitive sense of what to do and what can be skipped
So, I’m currently feeling like “ugh, it feels overwhelming because there are so many facets to think about, and idk which to focus on, and idk how many there are”, etc. But that’s ok, that’s what being a beginner is like!