Imagine a couple that tries to make a decision about how to set the table at their wedding. They spend all their time trying to work out this difficult decision, making lists and drawings, and asking Google and friends for advice. Yet underneath their efforts pertaining to the wedding table, a deeper doubt is lingering in their minds: whether they really want to marry each other in the first place. Unfortunately, they have not spent sufficient time contemplating this more fundamental question, and yet what
This is clearly unreasonable. Whether it makes sense to spend time on setting the wedding table depends on whether the wedding is sensible in the first place, and therefore the latter is clearly the most important question to contemplate and answer first. Two weeks after the wedding, a divorce is filed. It was all a waste, one that deeper reflection could have prevented.
This example may seem a little weird, yet I think it captures what most of us do most of the time to a striking extent. We all spend significant amounts of energy planning and executing ill-considered “weddings”. Rather than considering the most important and fundamental questions, we get caught up in ill-considered specific tasks that happen to feel important or interesting.