By 
How do you default? When you’re in the in-between times in life, when you get home from work with no plans, when you’re waiting in line somewhere, when you have nothing to do at work, when you’re just sitting around, waiting, how do you fill that time? When you’re not thinking about it, what do you do? What do you automatically turn to?
Being able to answer this question with something that isn’t stupid is one of the most important elements in your life.
In case you’re not clear on how you should be defaulting, here’s a spoiler alert for this article: doing things that are good for you is good.
So let’s be clear. If a lot of your life involves sitting around, wondering why your life isn’t better, that’s a really good fucking sign that you’re currently acting out your own problem by flattening your ass against that La-Z-Boy of yours.
That should be obvious. If you’re in any way unhappy with the way things are right now, and instead of changing those things, you just wallow around in them like a dipshit, you have no one to blame but you. Unless you have a an actual diagnosed disorder, sitting and wallowing is never a reaction to your problem. It inevitably is the problem.
The source of this problem is in how we default. When we’re not currently occupied by something else on our schedule, most of us turn to the most toxic six words in the English language: “What do I want right now?”
This is totally wrong. Bad dog. Defaulting to that question is, in the grand scheme of things, ruining your life. More often than not, “What do I want right now?” is the reason you look like shit, feel like shit, don’t do shit, and don’t have shit. It’s a question with a bunch of answers that are, well, shitty.
If your goal is to make your life better, then the correct question to default to is, mind-blowingly enough, “How can I make my life better?”
So instead of figuring out what will make you feel better right this second, figure out how you can create a situation where you would already feel better. Making that simple replacement—defaulting by answering that one question—could potentially take you from a life filled with hedonistic dipshittery to one where you’re actually the person you’d like to think you are.
But of course, this isn’t easy to do. You likely have a lifetime of “What do I want?” baked into you,. which is why you’ve stopped reading this fourteen times so far to look at boobs on Instagram.
But even when we decide to consciously try to make things better, we tend to come upon another question:
“Okay, so where do I start?”
After all, the act of making your life better is usually tricky. Sometimes, you don’t know what you’re unhappy about. Sometimes you think you’re unhappy because you don’t have more social media likes, when in reality, it’s because you have a bottomless pit in your soul that you try to fill with outside approval, and how the fuck do you actually solve a bottomless pit in your soul? Do you start by trying to give it a bottom? Do you remove the pit all together? Or do you just stop hunting so desperately for outside approval and hope that the pit just kinda dissolves (Hint: I think it might be that one)?
Sometimes you know what the problem is, but you haven’t the foggiest fucking clue what to actually do about it.
Sometimes you do know what you’re supposed to do, but have no idea how to do it.
I mean how does one just…eat fewer sheet cakes? Like what does that even mean?
When we just look at our entire lives on a macro level, our problems and solutions seem so ethereal and vague. We don’t really know where to begin when approaching the unending totality of everything wrong with our lives, so we ultimately just kind of do nothing, and resort to the old default of, “What do I want right now?” which means we resort to Fortnite, or horoscopes, or cheese fries, and wishing–a whole lot of waiting and wishing while nothing of impact happens.
To help with the ethereal, vague, “How do I fix all of the things about me at once problem?” I think it might be helpful to think of your life in terms of four different categories:
- Relationships
- Knowledge
- Physical and Mental Health
- Work & Aspirations
Now, focusing on one of those isn’t as simple as it seems. All four of these categories encapsulate a metric fuck ton of your life. Improving relationships can mean calling your aunt more, being a more available listener for close friends, or trying something sexually outside of the “jackhammer and explode in 40 seconds while she rolls her eyes” method.
Knowledge and understanding can be about getting better at your calc class, learning how to learn things better, or understanding the problem with warlords in the Congo more extensively.
Bodily and mental health can be about meditating, fixing the broken seratonin dispenser in your brain, or moving your shitty limbs until there’s less stuff on your shitty gut.
Improving your work can be about seeking a promotion, success in a new business, or just improving your ability to not zone out and play Fuck Marry Kill in your head during morning meetings.
So start by thinking through each category and determining what your goals will be. Order them by priority. That way, when you’re half-existing in your day, playing with your dick, and eating Fritos and are unsure of what to do, you have actual written down, aimed at goals to default to, like these:
Relationship Goals
- Go on more dates with my fiancee
- Call and talk to all members of my family more
- Check in with old friends more, so that the phrase, “Oh shit, your brother died?” never tumbles out of your mouth again.
Knowledge Goals
- Subscribe to Whatever Times and read eleventy-four articles a day to stay informed
- Get back to learning Italian
- Read that book about World War II your dad keeps nagging you about reading
Health Goals
- Meditate every day
- Run most days
- Stop eating cows all the time
Work Goals
- Set up promotion-based goals
- Knock them down
- Stop eye-fucking your boss
Once you have some goals written down, I think maybe the important first step is to just constantly make yourself aware of them. Look at them several times a day. Never let them fully leave your brain. Set alarms to remember to put your goals in front of your dumb face.
Make your high priority goals the things you default to thinking about all the time. Have them permanently on your mental list of things to do, and keep them there until they’re done. Do this until you’re defaulting to accomplishing these goals as much as possible.
Now you may be asking yourself, “How do I do that all the time and stay sane?” which is actually fair. You can’t be constantly looking to improve yourself. You’ll burn out, quit in like four seconds, and return to a life of perpetual phone scrolling and butt scratching.
So what you really need is a system of accomplishments and rewards. When you’re defaulting, start by answering the question of, “How can I make things better?” with action towards improving your life. Then reward yourself by answering your old default of, “What do I want right now?” And answer that with whatever you want–clubbing, Dominos, old Full House episodes (or whatever makes you feel like a happy little boy) when you’ve earned it.
That’s how you avoid burnout. Give yourself breaks when you need them, and credit when you deserve it. If you do this, you can alternate between the good default, and bad default as needed.
This is a lifestyle change worth making. How you default is how you generally behave, so if your defaults aren’t stupid, then your behavior will generally be less stupid, and your life will be less stupid.
So make your list of goals, consider them all the time, and when you don’t know what else to do, ask yourself, “How can I make my life better?”
For more on how to do this, check out my awesome, and totally free E-book, “When to Be An Idiot.”
