[IOTD][#9] Questioning life | Kent Nguyen's Lab

Originally published on Medium on September 19, 2018 · Written by hand, Pre-AI era.

Everything you do on daily basis are consequences of your choices. Why do you *have* to eat lunch at 12noon? Whatever the reason is, if it doesn’t align with your inner ‘need’, most likely it will feel draining. Instead of feeling recharged after lunch break, you’d probably feel worse.

I can’t claim to be the expert, I’m still as clueless about life as anybody, perhaps I’m just asking myself more questions:

Why do you need to commute long hours? What is the better arrangement?

Why a full time job defined as 9-to-5?

Why do you even come to an office to work?

Why do you eat lunch at 12noon? dinner at 6/7?

Why is there daily traffic jam and people are still knowingly getting in to it?

Why do we exercise?

Why do we like something so much?

Why is red called red?

Notice how kids ask really simple yet difficult questions, and us as parents struggle to answer them. I bet if your kid one day ask you one of the above, you would be speechless too.

They simply don’t know the fundamentals of life. The longer we live, the more we conform to “acceptable” norms, eventually we take everything for granted. What if you can go back to redefine your own fundamentals, imagine that.

Don’t live your life, lead your life.

At the end of the day, you only answer to your own self, not your parents, not your spouse, not your relatives.

Question everything, establish the new baseline. When you decide that you need to lead your own path, you’d discover a lot more choices you actually have in defining your day-to-day activities.