Updated 05/03 – added a paragraph under the inflation section.

As I am getting closer to my 30th birthday, I looked back at my twenties and feel astonished that I made it in one piece. I also feel burdened by the number of things I had to figure out by myself to approach a life that I do not resent.

But this is not a surprise: my parents were divorced since I can remember and my father died of an accident when I was 16. To be completely transparent, I did not have the best relationship with my father and I swore to myself that I would not make the same mistakes as he did.

This lack of a natural male role model put me on my own, trying to figure out a better way and avoid the mistakes of my father. As an auditory learner, I turned to YouTube and found various male mentors (Elliott Hulse, Stefan Molyneux, the MRA/MGTOW sphere, later Jordan Peterson, and more) which I would listen to religiously. I have greatly benefited from listening to them and I shudder about who I would have become if not for their life-saving content.

This article is my way to pay forward the hard-earned wisdom that I have gained during this decade.

A few caveats about me: I am very introverted, my superior function is intuition and my inferior function is extraverted sensation. Thus, attending to my inner world came to me very naturally whereas meeting the responsibilities of the world has always been daunting and demoralizing.

Having said that, the more I did my inner work, the more I was led to develop my extraversion and engage with the world. This progressive exposure was (and still is) not easy and it left me more than a few times exhausted and overwhelmed, up to dropping everything as I wait for the next sleep for a dream to help me.

Nevertheless, I can generalize a few categories of mistakes that I had to continually face and which I had to bitterly adapt:

• a hyper-rational attitude to life (part of the Oedipus complex),
• a refusal to commit or to make mistakes (part of the psychology of a puer aeternus),
• an exaggerated sense of self-importance (inflation).

The rest of this article will outline the strategies that I use to deal with them.

In my early twenties and as I started my engineering studies, I made an effort to become fully rational. Thus, I developed positions on ethics, morality, religion, politics, economics. I was convinced that I was right on all these topics or, at least, I could outargue people in a debate.

What came as a shock to me is that, though I was able to argue for hours on end on abstract topics, I was unable to deal with choices in my personal life, such as choosing a career or anything that dealt with relationships. A purely rational worldview, such as the one I had developed, was unable to deal with the dilemmas of real life because the information available is always incomplete and impossible to weigh objectively. I realized that I could only make choices if I claimed omniscience or if I oversimplified some aspects of the problem. Both were unacceptable to my commitment to being rational.

In a case like this, I had to learn to rely on various levels of intelligence other than rationality. I discovered that dreams were an important source of orientation. I also journaled through my confused and contradictory feelings a fair amount which provided clarity when faced with difficult choices. Finally, my body would also have it say, whether it is a gut instinct or something else. For instance, after starting an internship, I had ramping anxiety which turned into a panic attack. Knowing that this was my body warning me, I quit the internship before it got worse.

There is no issue with developing the intellect, but overdeveloping any function (notably the thinking function here) will leave one stunted as the other underdeveloped functions will not be able to assist and triangulate the right response to the infinitely complex problems we face every day.

When I started doing dream analysis, I noticed that most of my dreams were tied to my personal context. Moreover, some of them informed me about the positive or negative potentials ahead of me. I realized very quickly that one can (and needs) to act on the information provided by dreams, as a way to dialog with it. The unconscious does not react to words but to actions. More precisely, dreams compensate one-sided attitudes of one-sided actions/inactions.

Once I knew that the unconscious was always monitoring and responding to my actions, I still had to overcome the issue of commitment. I knew that between making mistakes and inaction, making mistakes was a lesser issue. But this could not shake away the fear of making mistakes that can take decades to recover from, as it happened in the past with my dedication to music.

The way I solved it is to make short term commitments to explore an activity as fully as possible. Voluntary and measured exposure to new situations reveals more of ourselves, our likes and dislikes, our interests and disinterests, up to bringing unconscious talents or wounds to the surface.

Unless a dream can orient you on what to do or not to do (rare but it happens) and if you are clueless about what to do next then there is no other choice than to pick something, commit to it for a good amount of time and then re-evaluate.

I’ve tried drawing, I’ve made YouTube videos, I tried yoga, I volunteered on an ecological farm, I’ve studied law on my own, I’ve worked on designing a video game prototype, I’ve made websites, I’ve taught music, etc.

I’ve done all these things to try them for size, to see if they would fit me. None of them did but I learned a great deal about who I am and who I am not, who I could be and who I am not willing to become.

Committing to a new activity to gain clarity for oneself is invaluable. It rounds up the personality, gives us reference points to relate to more people and the experience gained provides a new vantage point, allowing us to see differently than before. Finally, it’s a stern look at the fact that there are no guaranteed straight lines in life. Even if your goal is clearly north, sometimes the best direction is south for the first part of the journey.

Another necessity of having to act, despite the risk of making mistakes, is the pain of regret. People on their deathbed usually regret working too much and not spending enough time with their families, and there is no shortage of stories of people regretting key decisions or wasting decades inconclusively.

Knowing this, I wanted to find the right balance between minimizing regret but also being responsible for my choices. My approach is based on the eternal recurrence: when I am faced with a tough decision, I ask myself if I am willing to accept responsibly the consequences of my actions a hundred times, if not thousands of times or more. While this might sound extreme, I found it was the best heuristic to weigh the price of action and the price of inaction. It’s one thing to make a foolish mistake thousands of times, it’s another to miss an opportunity thousands of times.

My Memento Mori, filled manually at the time I wrote this article.

The future can be approached forcefully by sheer willpower, which is something I’ve tried for the largest part of my life. However, it rarely, if ever, works. The future is simply too complex to be predicted and it is foolish to claim otherwise. Thus, the future as such is better left alone.

The problem then is: how should one approach the future if it is too complex to be apprehended? Not having any reference point, orientation or arbitrary deadlines will usually mean no vision, no action, no commitment. And while it is necessary to take breaks, breaks that are too long will pile up more difficulties in one’s life.

The way I approach the future and plan my days, weeks, and months is similar to Jordan Peterson’s Future Authoring (part of the Self Authoring Suite). The core ideas are:

• one should be in a relaxed state of mind, a kind of reverie, where what needs to happen takes over what one wants to happen,
• there should be two futures: a desirable one that we strive towards and an undesirable one that we are moving away from,
• both futures should be embedded within different time horizons (i.e., day, week, month, year, decade).

I’ll give an example below.

I start with the negative because I find it easier to define a future I want to avoid. I also try to outline futures that feel realistic.

Future that I am trying to avoid:

• Next day – I have made no progress in writing my article or in my readings. I struggle to go to sleep, bothered by not having done anything.
• Next week – I’ve let out other responsibilities. The house is getting dirty and things are piling up. My work is not getting done. I might self-attack and binge on food to compensate.
• Next month – Anxiety has ramped up because I’ve been lazy. I overwork to compensate. Health issues and nightmares could come back.
• Next year – I’ve maintained my work at great pains but I’ve neglected personal relationships and the familial structure has taken a toll.
• Next decade – My work situation is at a bare minimum. Relationships are not good and I can see my kid looking at me for my mistakes. I have nothing to respond to it.

Future I am trying to reach:

• Next day – The article I’m writing is shaping itself up. I’ve done my daily readings. I feel tired but the good kind of tired.
• Next week – The article is done or nearly done and I can post it. I feel relief that it got out and I can spend some time with my family without guilt.
• Next month – I finished reading a book so I can move to the next one. The website is getting attended to. I am monitoring the progress of our kid as well as playing with her.
• Next year – The website has now more content and looks professional. I’m able to respond to more clients confidently. The family situation is a good balance of work and rest.
• Next decade – I am homeschooling my kid and I have a more active teaching role. Family life is great, there could be another kid.

Final comment:

The goal of this exercise is not to guess the future or try to force it to happen. Rather, it’s a tool of orientation and defining one’s values positively and negatively. Life will get in the way of your plans, so consider this plan as a bad plan. But a bad plan is always better than no plan.

Schema of two futures, one positive and one negative, both embedded into different time horizons.

One of the main dangers of individuation is inflation. Inflation is a technical term (see definition here) that defines the state of an ego that is identified with something beyond itself. An inflated ego gains a sense of exaggerated self-importance and an exacerbated judgmental attitude over others. Grandiosity, narcissism, autoeroticism, elitism are all too typical of inflation. One feels that one has reached new heights and thus should be praised and admired for it whereas, paradoxically, we have regressed into a deeper unconsciousness. In the case of an archetypal identification with the self, one might even believe that we are Christ reincarnated.

Despite all its negative aspects, inflation is part of the psychic life and should not be condemned as such. However, we need strategies to deflate an inflation before its hubris sends us into a pitfall.

The first goal is to be able to recognize when inflation happens. For some people, it’s a change of intonation in the voice. For others, it could be a change in body posture. I personally feel that I am getting inflated when something is getting to my head and expanding it like a balloon. When this happens, I do my best to let the pressure dissipate downwards, usually towards the heart. This is not an easy task. I remember days where I would feel inflation lurking in constantly, maybe 100 times a day, and I had to constantly push it back.

My main strategy to avoid inflation is based on “show, don’t tell,” which I would describe as “act first, discuss later.” Talking about things, overthinking scenarios or fantasizing have always been a primary source of inflation for me. Worse, they are all ways for me to avoid the actual doing of things. To prevent this, I’ve resigned myself to not talk about my plans before I’ve put some work into them, letting my actions speak for me.

The point is not to avoid criticism or to be a perfectionist, rather it is to work on an idea to a point where I can actually present a draft, a prototype, maybe an actionable plan to others. In my experience, grounding a discussion on something that already “half-exists” favors positive critical interaction. It shows commitment, that I have done my research to the best of my ability and that I am looking for real feedback to move forward.

In fact, seeing how people react to “what I’ve done this far” is an essential part of the process. If people react negatively to something in which I’ve poured a lot of effort, planning, research, or getting things together is a sign that I have made a serious mistake somewhere and I need to reconsider what I have been doing. For instance, when I released my first album, I could hear a deafening silence around it. People simply did not care about what I’ve done. This is the kind of non-verbal feedback that is essential to understand.

One thing that needs to be accounted for is that sometimes we choose the wrong topic in the first place. The lack of humility and typical bravado of inflation, described by The Dunning–Kruger effect among others, will cause a lot of problems if left unchecked. The way I like to phrase my solution to this is “do what is below you”. To avoid inflation, one should pick the unflattering things that need to be done and for which one might not receive any congratulatory acknowledgment. The things that need to be done are obvious, in fact so obvious that people around you will react dumbfounded when you do them as if to communicate that they should have been done a long time ago. This is the kind of signal that tells me that I am engaged with the right thing. It has to be said: the proper task is hard work, completely unglamorous and often very lonely.

On a side note, a lot of so-called “spiritual knowledge” creates a special kind of inflation that is very pernicious. This includes information that creates a “woah” effect or has an addictive component to them. Shallow New Age beliefs, occult knowledge, promethean/stolen fire, mind-blowing revelations, etc. are all dangerously inflationary and should be managed carefully or avoided in favor of wisdom. Indeed, whereas inflationary knowledge makes one float away from a simple and humble life, wisdom grounds oneself into reality, usually by leaving a bitter taste at the realization that the picture is never all black or white.

Finally, dreams are always a way to detect inflation. Robert Johnson’s Dreamwork Seminar goes through a few dreams with the theme of inflation.

To learn more about inflation, see the key text from Jung “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Work 7) and Edward Edinger’s “The Inflated Ego” in Ego and Archetype.

To summarize until here, I have written about the necessity to act and to commit in a way that is oriented positively towards a desirable future and away from a negative future. I also have spent some time warning about inflation.

For this final part, I discuss my process of coming up with a list of things to do. This is a skill that is necessary to learn because, most of the time, one is alone with no one to get instruction on what to do. While it has an obvious positive side, this lack of constraints can be completely overwhelming. To manage this complexity, I use a two-step process: ideation and rank ordering.

Every morning, after my dream analysis/journaling is done, I sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and ask myself “What needs to be done? What requires my attention? What should I attend to?” Then I start writing down everything until my mind is blank. I do this a few times, trying to get every single thing out of my system. In fact, sometimes more ideas come during the day, in that case, I write it on a post-it or on my phone.

During this phase of ideation, no critical thinking is allowed at all. It’s about writing things on paper so they leave the mind (kinesthetic anchoring). Evaluating them will come later.

One might feel a lot of resistance by writing down some of the items. This is normal, especially on the first try. Actually, a sign that something needs to be done is that it’s hard to write and hard to look at.

Ideation, as described here, is different from brainstorming. The proper mindset is not to think about a problem to solve, rather it’s about allowing oneself to hear the call of things that needs to be done. For a simple example, washing the dishes is not a “problem to solve” rather it’s something that requires to be attended to.

Once the mind cannot come up with more things to write, it’s time to group the items together and/or to rank order them.

Grouping items is simply putting them together under the same label. It could be “things to buy/research” or it could be “if I do X, Y needs to be done as well”.

Rank ordering can be done positively or negatively. Either you can ask yourself “what should be done first?” or “what should I not leave unattended?” and then order those items accordingly. Sometimes, this step doesn’t even need to be done because some items might jump to you as being more important than others as if they had a certain glow around them (beware inflation!).

Another strategy to prioritize items could be the Eisenhower matrix.

Now that I have everything in front of me, I can structure the coming week by choosing a few items for each day or I can simply pick something to focus on the day. For complex weeks, I lay out a few days in advance. For normal days, I usually take a look at my sheet and pick one item that calls my attention to focus on for the day.

A word on overworking: one typical mistake that I’ve made frequently is to pack a lot of things to do and then struggle to do them. This is a sign that you are overloading yourself. To avoid this, I start by putting breaks before tasks so I make sure that I balance rest and work. The goal is to move away from the notion of “being productive” and to discover one’s natural rhythm for productivity. Those are not the same things.

I work under the assumption that I have an endless number of things to do. I need therefore to find the rhythm at which I can do them day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Generally speaking, my natural rhythm is to focus on one hard thing every two days (on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) and one easier thing on the other. I also set up a mandatory rest day (usually Sundays) as a day to do nothing or as little as possible.

Once you picked something to do, it is time to make that idea into a sequence of action. In my experience, one faces two kinds of issues: 1) overtly complex problems or 2) picking up a new habit.

The first category is about transforming a complex problem into something manageable (for instance, organizing a wedding). I approach a task like that by first finding the most constraining or least flexible part of the problem. It’s the part of the problem that is the most necessary to get done before moving to the others, by definition.

Finding those constraints (sometimes objective, sometimes more subjective) reduces the problem into something that can be discussed and evaluated. I’ll give two personal examples:

• For our wedding, we were under time constraint much more than money or guests. Therefore we had to search for a place to book before all else could happen.
• For buying a car, I researched as much as I could and decided that I should look for 1) a second-hand model, 2) a five-door hatchback, 3) a brand that requires low maintenance cost.

This is the same as designing a “bad plan,” as a bad plan is better than no plan.

Once you have your bad plan, it’s time to find places (online or not) where they offer what you are looking for. It can happen that you need to visit 3-5 places (if you are lucky it can happen on the first visit, yet sometimes it takes more than five tries).

Having collected many available options from each place, you then have a selection of dozens of options to evaluate against each other. There should be options that stand out from others (technically called the pareto front). Then it’s a matter of choosing the option with the better trade-off (price vs quality, time vs price, etc.).

A few comments:

• It’s likely that your bad plan might change completely during this process. That’s why it’s called a bad plan because it is meant to be changed and adapted to new information. Remain true to the original intention of the plan, which is to give an orientation and manage complexity, rather than forcing it to happen.
• If you have too many options or not enough, your criterion of selection is either too tight or too large. Add/remove constraints according to the amount of choice.
• Selection should be a balance of thinking and feeling. If an option looks good but feels very wrong, listen to your feelings.
• The careful reader will see that this is a repeat of the ideation, rank-ordering process. Allowing to separate these two attitudes is absolutely crucial. Don’t be critical when exploring, don’t be idealistic when comparing the options in front of you.

Other methods for this part include the David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” workflow (nice schematics here and there).

The second category of issues is how to pick up a new habit.

Many people, myself included, start a new habit in a way that is not sustainable past a month (if not a week).

To make sure that you build a habit in a progressive and sustainable way, I recommend Mini Habits by Stephen Guise. In that book, Stephen Guise describes that a good actionable goal should be one that is small enough to be embarrassing. For instance, to learn push-ups, do one a day, not more. To read a book, read one page, not more.

While the first days might be embarrassingly easy, you will be surprised how hard it is to actually keep at it after a few days. In my case, despite being a good reader, the internet and phones have made reading books very difficult. To learn to read again (or rather to detox from smartphones), I did set the goal of reading one page of a book before going to bed every night. It took two weeks before I could enjoy reading again.

As a summary, one needs to learn how to live by oneself in a mature and proactive manner.

My strategy can be summarized as list what comes to mind, pick what needs to be done in a way that avoids inflation and act while paying attention to feedback. This should engage everything at your disposal: dreams, a complex mediation of the four psychic functions (thinking/feeling, intuition/sensation) as well as paying attention to social cues.

Encouraged by Peterson’s lectures and Future Authoring, I’ve come up with this process for myself and have been using it for the past three years. When I started doing this, I felt for the first time making real progress instead of chasing some glamorous or heroic deed. This however came at the price of being excruciatingly hard.

As a form of continual progressive exposure, it will make you face things that needs to be done but that you really do not want to do. I remember being paralyzed at having to write a formal letter, being overwhelmed by anxiety at researching a topic, being unable to start a physical activity despite all my goodwill for more than a few months, shaking nervously after driving lessons, etc. And even with the best will, items on my list stay day after day, weeks after weeks. They need to be done but it is as if attending to some of them is as difficult as moving a mountain.

Progressive exposure is difficult and can hurt if one is not careful. Some days, the best we got is the ability to put one foot in front of another. We need to be kind towards ourselves, making steps small enough that we are willing to do it as well as having a therapeutic outlet to manage the unexpected magma of emotions that comes to the surface.

Here is an example of my process for this week.

The page has seven “columns” (to do, website, baby, daily, buy, monitor, inner work) as well as a yellow post-it with what I am planning to focus on the day. The pages on the right are similar lists of the past weeks.

It bears mentioning that, compared to this one, my earlier lists were very messy. Also, this form of organization emerged after many different iterations and grows organically when topics appear or disappear.

I also use a blackboard where my wife and I put our shared weekly activities, as well as a digital calendar (for travel and long-term planning).

This unusual article was hard for me to write and I am not sure I managed to convey what I wanted to convey. Nevertheless, these are the strategies that I use to deal with the requirements of the outer world.

I’ll end up with a quote.

There is no guarantee — not for a single moment — that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer — at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Visions