The curse of keeping your options open
Embrace small discomforts and better problems, choose commitment over options, extend trust to invite trust, and stop postponing life—live fully now.
October 25th, 2025 - Issue #141 - read online
👋 Welcome to Pursuit—your weekly pause for intentional living, self-discovery, and inner clarity. My name is Amir, and every week I share four carefully chosen ideas to help you design a more fulfilling life.
This week’s reflections:
📚 Useful ideas for life
🚪 The curse of keeping your options open
🔄 Trust as a self-fulfilling prophecy
🌌 What are you postponing your life for?
📚 Useful ideas for life
Small discomforts, big consequences
Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.
Optimistic pessimism
The optimal state of mind is neither optimism, which leaves you unprepared for adversity, nor pessimism, which destroys motivation, but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.
The gift of the present moment
Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.
Trade bad problems for better ones
The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.
🚪 The curse of keeping your options open
When I was younger, I used to think that committing to something would feel oppressive, limiting, restrictive. But I now realize that the opposite is true — that commitment is freeing. It lets you focus. It collapses the need for you to continue considering options endlessly and instead grounds you to where you are, and helps you enjoy the rewards of living out one of those options. In other words: the value of commitment is that you get something tangible in exchange for it. By making a choice, you get something Real. Whereas stewing in your potential and refusing to transform it into something Actual leaves you living more in your head—weighing and considering and thinking about all of the things you could be doing, but not actually doing any of them.
Don’t be afraid of the Actual. Don’t be so precious with your potential that you don’t make commitments. Making choices and letting go of options can be just as rewarding as “keeping your options open” — more so, in fact! Because you actually get things from commitment. Rewards. Meaning. Depth. Richness. Intimacy. Progress. Skill. Clarity. Confidence. These are valuable, important things! Things that living in the world of optionality and postponing these ‘choices’ that feel so essential and defining to your future does not offer you. And in a way, the options you are so worried about losing don’t really disappear. Not if they are something that is truly for you. If they are compelling to you in the future, you can probably reopen them. But be cautious about indulging in the dangerous idea that options are the whole point, that commitment and choice are the enemy. Commitment is where all of the juice is!
🔄 Trust as a self-fulfilling prophecy
The best leaders I know extend trust and loyalty long before receiving it - they treat people as if they’ve already proven trustworthy. This seems naive until you realize it’s a forcing function: by acting as if people have already earned your trust, you create the conditions that make it almost inevitable that they will.
🌌 What are you postponing your life for?
We imagine our happiness lies somewhere in the future, postponing fulfillment to an imagined later. But this waiting game is a trick—life occurs only in the present. Hoping to live “someday” robs us of living fully today.
When asked about our lives, we describe them in abstractions—tasks done, places visited—but rarely how those moments felt. Life isn’t found in plans, expectations, or hopeful waiting. It unfolds only in the silence and awareness of the present.
Your “self”—the ego, the collection of hopes and fears—doesn’t truly exist; it’s just a narrative you maintain. When you let go of this illusion, you’re freed to genuinely live. True liberation isn’t something waiting ahead; it’s right here, right now.
🎵 Music I’m listening to
You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶
🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🦥 Slow rave: Sleepy techno for tired danced
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments
Previously on Pursuit:
