Dismantling the Status Quo

Attempting a Life From First Principles

I let several months breeze by before catching up with an old colleague. When he messaged to say it had been too long, I’d already been turning over my own lack of progress and wondering what I’d even have to talk about.

As he told me about his latest move up the property ladder, I found myself admiring his ability to make big decisions and adapt. They always seemed to move his family, finances and freedom in a better direction.

Before long they had two homes in two countries, reduced their working hours, and appeared to have arrived at a version of life that genuinely suited them. It wasn’t that every decision had been perfect. It was that each one seemed to make the next a little easier.

I couldn’t help comparing it with my own trajectory.

My relationships seemed to carry unresolved things into the next. Every job took something out of me. Investments lost money. Injuries closed doors on the scope of future adventures. My decisions often felt as though they accumulated friction rather than momentum.

Was that luck? Intelligence? Or was I simply making poorer decisions?

Perhaps he wasn’t asking life to justify itself before committing to it.

For years I’ve pushed against the status quo, questioning inherited assumptions in the belief that if I examined life carefully enough I’d eventually arrive somewhere wiser and better.

Instead, my dismantling has yet to prove itself an improvement. I still have many days where I feel I’m on a looped trail, passing familiar ground without advancing. Finding comfort in the familiar and loss in what remains unexplored.

Much of society inherits meaning without ever consciously choosing it. Family. Career. Community. Tradition. Ambition. Even consumption. I’d gradually stepped away from many of these, not through rebellion, but because I couldn’t simply accept them. Everything had to earn its place.

Without fully realising it, I’d been attempting to build a life from first principles.

The problem is that first principles are excellent for engineering. They’re likely less forgiving when applied to your own existence.

As my scrutiny picked apart the structures I’d inherited, it also dissolved many of the things that gave those structures meaning. Ironically, I’d carefully dismantled the very walls that had been sheltering me.

I can’t simply be told that the goals most people pursue should matter to me. I have to examine them for myself, often arriving somewhere different from the accepted view.

But I’m beginning to wonder whether reflection itself has diminishing returns.

Every decision becomes analysed for its assumptions, motives and consequences until eventually there is nothing left to propel you forward. Every certainty becomes provisional. Every purpose becomes negotiable.

I left my job and suddenly I couldn’t offer strangers the clean answer to, what do you do? ‘Not a lot’, or ‘this’, to which ever activity they found me doing, wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

The philosopher John Vervaeke often speaks about the dangers of purpose. A fixed goal can leave you feeling like a failure if you never reach it, or strangely empty if you do. He suggests orientation instead: not a destination, but a direction.

I’m still trying to work out which way I’m facing. Exploring new hobbies, expanding the old ones, filling life with busyness as so many of us do. Most don’t feel their version of busy is a choice though, it’s born of the necessities of maintaining life.

People celebrate first-principles thinkers because we associate them with innovation, originality and progress. What we hear less about is what happens when you apply that same relentless analysis to your own life.

My freedom has a shadow. Like a niggling sense I’m breaking some social etiquette or asking too many questions like a toddler trying to make sense of the world.

Question enough of the assumptions that quietly organise your existence and you may not find liberation. You may simply find yourself suspended.

I’ve always wanted my writing to help people. Not by offering solutions, but by saying, “This is a difficult adventure. Let’s give it some thought.”

Lately I’ve wondered whether curiosity has its own hazards.

When you invite someone to question everything, you may also be loosening the very threads that keep their life coherent. Perhaps some beliefs endure not because they’re objectively true, but because they spare us the hard, unanswerable questions.

I’ve found myself assuming that if I thought deeply enough I’d eventually earn a better life.

But I can’t be sure that’s how it works. So many of us are handed insights previous generations never had to carry. The language of health and optimisation is just the sea we swim in now, sold to us as more knowledge, when it may just be more noise.

Wisdom might not simply be the removal of illusions. Perhaps it’s learning which ones are worth dismantling, which ones secure the roof above your head, and which ones provide direction.