What You "Should" Be Doing Now
In the last few posts, we have been exploring the word “should” and its relationship to happiness. A thorough understanding of the word should is important as there are many pitfalls regarding its use that have the potential to create emotional pain.
One of the most common and dangerous uses of the word should is in relation to what one should be doing right now.
For centuries religious, political and economic powers have told people what they “should” be doing. Let’s examine these claims.
So…what should you be doing right now? Take a moment to think carefully, what exactly should you be doing right now?
Let’s say you think you should be doing X right now. The next question is how do you know this? How can you really know? Can you find indisputable proof that you should be doing X right now?
Can you be absolutely certain that you should be doing X right now? The answer is no.
There is no way that you can know with certainty what you should be doing.
People always have, and always will, use their intuition to determine what to do. To-Do Lists and explicit value systems can be helpful in finding ballpark solutions to what you should be doing now, but there is no certainty.
The ideal fantasy is that you could program a computer with all of the facts regarding your life and the universe, and then the computer would output a list of what you should do next. In order for you to trust the computer’s output, you would have to trust that nearly every fact of the universe was properly included in the software, and this is impossible.
Given there is no way to be certain about what you should be doing right now, you can extrapolate that there is no way to determine what you should have done in the past, or what you should do in the future.
So why do you punish yourself with self-blame about your actions?
Why do you punish yourself about your past and worry about present and future actions? You cannot know details about past alternate realities, and you cannot predict the future. You are always doing the best you can. You have limited knowledge about yourself and the world. Every answer you give is the best answer you can give at the time. Every action you take is the best action you can muster.
Self-blame regarding your actions is a childhood tool of torture. Self-blame is an immature behavior based on the fantasy that you know what to do, or should know what to do, every second of your life.
The fact is you can never know this information. In addition, nobody else knows (or has known) with certainty, what they should do. If others seem to think they know, they are just good at pretending.
