Do the next right thing

If you ever feel uncomfortable emailing someone you respect out of nowhere, remember this: in 1933, a woman sent psychologist Carl Jung a letter asking how to “live well”.

A breezy question to ask, no doubt.

Jung responded, absolutely spiking the question as “unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live.” He said that “one lives as one can.”

That said, he did give this woman – who needed help and went to the trouble of penning the famous psych for advice – some practical help:

If you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.

Do the next right thing. Seems simple enough. Righto.

The next most necessary thing

Asking yourself “what’s the next right thing I can do?” is great because it prompts three things you can forget in the flow of life:

1. Awareness.
2. Reflection.
3. Consideration.

Awareness of moment you’re in. Reflection on what you – and the moment – need. Consideration of your options.

Or put less ponderously: you are how you spend your time. So take a beat and make sure you like who you’re being.

Not just about “productivity”

Now, this will only work if you’ve accepted two things:

1. You have value outside of the things you produce for money.
2. You don’t have an infinite capacity to do more and more.

Nothing in nature operates at 100% all the time. Shock: you’re part of nature.

That means having a snack, taking a nap or hanging out with someone can be your next right thing as readily as punching something off your to-do list.

The next right thing is about doing what the moment asks of you and doing it wholeheartedly. If you need to work, work. If you need to rest, rest and rest completely.

Benefits of reflection

I bet you a crisp $20 bill that “take care of self” and “see friends” are the next right things you ignore most often in favour of things that you care less about.

That’s the benefit of doing this sort of reflection, right? It forces you, over time, to see the things you decide are less “right” than something else. If you don’t do it consciously, you can bet you’re doing it unconsciously all the time.

Do you keep deciding the “next right thing” is about work and not your family? Something in service of someone else instead of something in service of you? Scrolly instead of strolly?

That’s not to say you should never, you know, spend some time on your phone flipping through vids of a cat that’s louder than a jet ski. There will be times when that’s absolutely the right thing to do.

It’s just a matter of you figuring out, deliberately, how often that’s right versus all the other things you want to do. So long as you reflect on how you feel about what you’re doing, you’ll eventually figure out what you truly want to do.

But you need action first. You need to make the first choice.

You are what you do

It’s like we’ve spoken about before: you’re the sum total of everything you’ve done do.

We’re our attention. We’re our actions. Thoughts are just that: thoughts. Powerful as they are, they’re fleeting. They can be a starting point but they can’t define our lives by themselves.

You’re defined by the choices you make. Not just the big ones. All the little ones matter too – the in-between moments, the downtime, the “eh, whatevers.” They’re as much your life as deciding where to live or who to marry.

By pausing to ask yourself “what’s the next right thing?”, we can try and make sure we’re on the right track. We can tilt ourselves towards the kinds of actions we want to take.

Make choices you’ll look back on fondly

The goal, in some ways, is to make choices you’ll look back on tomorrow and say “Yeah, I’m glad I did that.” You won’t have a 100% hit rate, sure, but if you can bat 51% on the regular you’ll be doing okay.

It speaks to an idea expressed with some dramatic flair by the German philosopher Friedrick Nietzsche: the eternal return.

It’s a simple idea. Imagine if you had to live your exact life over and over again. Here’s Nietzsche:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.’

How would you respond? Would you – as Nietzsche put it – “throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon”? Or would you look at the demon and say “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”?¹

This bargain would loom over every choice, every moment. Here’s Nietzsche again:

The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

It’s easy to read this and reflect on everything you’ve done up until this point, mourning or celebrating the things you’ve already done (or had done to you). But it’s more interesting to think about the now.

Think about the next decision you get to make in this light. How does it change the stakes? Do you think it’ll get you somewhere you want to go again and again (and again and again)? What’s the next right thing in that reality?

If you had to live your life over, which mistakes do you want to make twice?