Not exactly 5 years, maybe 4 years 9 months, maybe 5 years 2 months. But around 5.

What would you change? What would you do differently than what you are doing right now? You’d probably stop doing a lot of things. You have only five years left after all. Why bother?

I would probably just sell everything, find a house with a view of the sea, and spend my last years reading and hosting friends.

What if it was around 10 years? That is twice as long. Depending on your age, that might be half or a third of your entire life so far. Dropping everything, knowing there are ten more good years, is a bit extreme. Maybe, during these ten years, you could work on your legacy™.

As for me, I’d probably try even harder to answer the question that has occupied me for the past 15 years: What is a good life?

The thing is, no one knows how long they have left. In Western countries, the average life expectancy is around 80ish. (Knock on wood.)

I'm 33, so that's nearly 50 years left. But it's highly unlikely that at 80, I'm mentally and physically as fit as I am right now. So let's remove 5 years from this: 45 left.

Of these 45 years, I will be asleep for a third. And I need to, because otherwise it will be even less. “I can sleep when I die” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

30 years left. So what would I do now?

Here is the thing: I don't have 30 years left. I might have them on paper (again, knock on wood), but in reality, this number is much, much smaller.

Because during these 30 years, for the majority of the time, I won't be truly present. I won't live in the moment, but instead either regret the past or worry about the future. And worse, I'll be wasting my time with trivial things that don't bring me any closer to... well, anything.

We all do this. We worry about the future and how much time we have left, and then we spend most of our days scrolling through TikTok or doomscrolling world news.

But why worry about the future when we aren’t present in the moment? When we might as well just be dead to that moment.

"Many men die at age 25, but aren’t buried until they’re 75."
— Someone said this.

I recently became very aware of this.

I've realized I had been complaining that I don't have time to do all the things I care about, while simultaneously wasting my time with all kinds of things, be it staring numbly at my phone, trying to play a corporate game I don't care about, or generally just being a pain in the ass for my loved ones.

In the grand scheme of the universe, a human life is incredibly short. But from a human's point of view, 80 years is a long time.

But none of this matters if we are unable to be fully present for these 80 years, if we spend all this limited time worrying about things outside of our locus of control.

Most of us want similar things: to have good social and romantic relationships; work on things that fulfill us; care about our bodies and our minds; learn new things; and have fun while doing them.

In essence, what we all want is to matter, to feel safe, to be seen, and to be free.

Being present takes work. You need to remind yourself not to be dead to the moment. But the more you do this, the more effortless it becomes.

And the more effortless it becomes, the less life happens to you and the more you happen to life. And then you are alive to the moment.

And that's what we are all here for.

Then I realized: I do the same thing, and so do the people around me. That is, we outsource our thinking to a machine, which can’t think in the first place (though that fact is a whole separate piece I am working on).

Since the rise of Generative AI, what I caught myself doing is using tools like ChatGPT or Claude to go through problems. Not as a help, but instead had it spit out an answer that I then (at times blindly) adopted as my own solution.

And going by that post above, and the anecdotal evidence I have, I am not alone in this.

This is not thinking. Again, the machine cannot think. It can only match patterns and emulate writing. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated models, the solution the machine gives us seems like the solution we were looking for.

But if I am not the one thinking, and thus not the one solving the problem (because problem-solving is what thinking ultimately is), I have learned nothing. I have just taken another one's thoughts (and again, the machine cannot think) as my own. I see little value in this.

This phenomenon is, however, not a recent problem, even though Generative AI has exacerbated it. Outsourcing our thinking to other things, or people, is something humanity has been doing forever.

Before Generative AI, we outsourced our thinking to influencers and whatever the algorithmic timelines fed us. Before that, it was to politicians, celebrities, and other people in power. Before that, it was the churches. And before that, it was the shamans. (To be fair, people still do this.)

But at least in these examples, the thinker we outsource to is human. We can, most often, deduce what their agenda is. But what is the agenda of a machine that has been trained by a group of people who probably don’t even understand how that machine works in the first place?

I believe that in this age, at a time when we get inundated with information from all directions, the ability to think is the most important skill we have.

I expect that when, and if, the AI revolution arrives, people who have the ability to think are the ones who will not be left behind. Thinkers will be the ones who will thrive in these uncertain times.

And this is how to think:

I see four parts that are necessary for thought. You need to cultivate all four, because one or two alone may not be enough to form your best thinking.

These are:

• Thinking in silence;
• Thinking through inspiration;
• Thinking by writing;
• Thinking by not (actively) thinking.

Thinking in silence

AI, algorithmic timelines, and generally just the noise¹ we live in, don’t give us the space to think. They hijack our attention and concentration.

This is our fault. Whenever we have the slightest moment of silence—and we call that boredom—we try to fill the void with whatever we can find.

But there is a reason you have your best thoughts under the shower, or as soon as your head hits the pillow. These might be the only moments you experience true silence and boredom.

When we manage to turn off the outside world, we are able to listen to our inner voice. That is thinking. That voice that speaks to you, at times maybe roughly, though that is for another essay, is what thinking is.²

By listening and talking to the inner voice, we can give it problems to solve. We can mentally go through the steps and let our minds untangle whatever we are currently working on. If we feed it with the correct pieces, and let it do its job without interruption, it’ll allow us to solve the puzzle.

This is hard. Thinking is an active skill (though there is a passive element to that, more soon) that burns a lot of energy. The brain alone consumes, on average, around 400 calories per day. To give you an idea: 30 minutes of running burns the same amount. (So feed your brain the nutrients, exercise, and rest it needs.)

I am a strong believer in cultivating silence to let our minds go wild and start forming thoughts. It is not easy, though, modern civilization likes to flood us with distractions. Therefore, I try to find moments throughout the day where I embrace silence. (And I am not talking about absolute silence like you have in outer space. You don’t need 0 decibels; rather, what you need is to not have inputs. White noise is completely fine and might even be beneficial to some. If I struggle with sounds, I listen to a mix of white noise and thunderstorms.)

But embracing silence is hard for me. I struggle with this because I have the tendency to fill the silence with... something. Anything. Not necessarily because I’m afraid of the silence, but because boredom is at times painful. Boredom is just so... boring.

I’m not used to it anymore, so I have to force myself to accept it. And only then can I sit in silence and let my mind work. And every time I give it the space it needs, I am surprised by what that squishy thing in my skull is capable of.

Thinking through inspiration

While the building block above shows how to create space for thinking, it’s inspiration, I believe, that sparks thought in the first place.

Not every thought is worth something. I doubt this is a surprise to you, but if we’d follow every thought we’d ever have life would be pretty fucking weird.

To succeed at thinking, we need to feed our minds the necessary material to refine what happens up there.

This happens through a process I (and I probably stole it) call cross-pollination.

Cross-pollination is when you take a whole bunch of Lego bricks from all kinds of different sources to build your own castle in your mind.

You achieve this by consuming broadly.

But not all consumption is equal.

There is a reason everyone talks about brain rot currently, because mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and watching people do whatever the algorithm gets them views, is not the type of consumption I am talking about.

Rather, we’re talking about content (and it can still happen on TikTok, the medium is NOT the problem) that challenges you.

For me, this content primarily exists as the written word. It is the reason why I read as much as I do. But I also find it in blog posts like these, or newsletters, or at times even on text-based social media like Bluesky or Threads (though let me be real, this is the exception, most content on there is mediocre).

You can find that content also in multimedia formats, be it podcasts, YouTube videos, or (good!) TikTok shorts. Or you find it as a little nugget in some random TV show or movie. Or while talking to other people, or observing nature.

What is important here is that you consume actively. Not necessarily to learn every time you look at something, but by spending focused time with the media.

And yes, for that, you need to put away your phone, turn off your gaming console, or whatever else you are currently doing. NO multitasking. We all know by now that multitasking doesn’t exist. Sit with the material, consume it, and let it feed your thoughts with new Lego bricks.

One very important thing, however, is this: don’t only consume things with which you agree or that you already believe. All this does is feed your idiocy (and we are all idiots) and enforce negative cycles.

Consume stuff you hate. Consume what the enemy created, whoever that enemy is (and then ask yourself, why do you have enemies?). Consume things that are uncomfortable because they might show you truths you want to hide from. Consume broadly and widely, and outside of your comfort zone, because it gives you perspective and shows you things you may not have known.

I am not saying you need to adopt these views. Not if you fundamentally disagree with them, and especially not if they are just plain wrong. Bigots are bigots (and I believe they are bigots because they do not consume what their “enemies” create). But this at least shows you what not to think about.

This is crucial, too. This is anti-thinking, another part of having “good” thoughts. But how do you know what to anti-think if you don’t know what is out there?

Thinking through writing

Yes, I am biased. But I believe that writing is the other necessary skill to succeed in our current times.

Because what writing allows is to sort and distil the thinking you do, break it down into pieces and recombine it with other stuff.

As long as the thinking just stays in your mind, I’d argue that it is worthless. This is especially true for ideas. Everyone has ideas. The world certainly does not lack ideas.

Ideas are not worth anything if they do not lead to future steps.

The first step is to write it down. Because writing is the one other magic trick humans possess.

And before you tell me that Generative AI is taking this from us: LLMs do not write.

What they do might look like writing, it might feel like writing, but it is not writing. Instead, GenAI outputs text, syntactically flawless text, yes, but devoid of any substance. The machine just breaks down writing into a mathematical formula³, robbing writing of all that makes it magical. (And a lot of us lack the necessary taste to understand that this writing is simply not good. Grammatically correct ≠ good.)

So you need to write yourself. And as the screenshot at the beginning of this essay ironically shows, even writing down your problem as an AI prompt clarifies your thought.

There are two ways to solve problems through writing, and I alternate between the two of them: they are writing slowly, and writing fast.

Writing slowly

I’d argue that to write slowly you have to write by hand. Be it on a piece of paper, or like I do, on one of these fancy e-ink devices.

But through writing by hand, you are forced to slow down, simply because your hand cannot catch up to the speed of your thinking. And this allows you to “de-jumble” the mess in your head before you put it down on paper.

This blog post was first brainstormed on the equivalent of two sheets of A4 paper, and what came out was basically a completely finished post that just needed a bit of polishing (to transform bullet points into proper prose, for example).

I write most of my blog posts this way. I also write my journal by hand every morning, and most of my notes are handwritten, too.

Again, this is to make sense of what is in my head, by giving me the space (and the silence, there are no inputs when I do this) to think through things.

(In theory, you could also use an old-school typewriter. Because if you type too fast on that thing, you jam the keys. This is a great analogy because if you write too fast by hand, you jam your brain.)

Writing fast

Another practice I follow is what I call the brain dump. This has to happen on a computer, either by typing if you are a fast typist or maybe by recording a voice note.

The value of the brain dump is by “emptying” your mind. The goal is not to form perfectly finished nuggets of thought but instead to unload all that is in your mind, all that is taking up your mental bandwidth.

Often, what comes out of a brain dump session is not truly valuable if looked at through a vacuum. It is important that you don’t filter and instead write everything down that comes up, unedited and raw.

When you look at this brain dump, you’ll realize that most of it is trash. That is ok, that is the point of the exercise. You want to get the trash out of your head.

But with a certain distance (I never read the brain dumps the day I wrote them), you may find certain specks of gold. Here and there, you see a nugget that, if you disassemble it, might lead to something. And then I’d suggest you take that nugget and go through it by writing by hand.

Thinking by not (actively) thinking

Because thinking is problem-solving, in theory, the result of thought is a solved problem.

Sometimes you can’t solve the problem when you actively think about it. You just can’t find the solution, no matter how much time you spend on it.

In these cases, stop. Take some distance. Let it rest, do something completely different, and ignore it for a few hours or days.

You may have experienced this before. You struggled for hours to come up with a solution, kept failing, and ultimately gave up.

But then, in the unlikeliest of situations, you had the epiphany you waited for. The complete solution to your problem suddenly came up in your mind as if planted there by some alien life form when you were not paying attention.

This is thinking by not thinking. It is passive. It happens without you forcing it, in the subconscious, while you do other things. I don’t know why it happens. I don’t understand what processes run in our subconscious mind in the background, I only know that I’ve experienced this before.

As a writer, the way I use it is to never hit publish on bigger pieces (like this one) the day I wrote them. I often let them sit and ripen in the back of my mind. When I sit down with them again, I often perceive things I hadn’t before.

The same goes when I struggle to fix a problem at work. Giving myself the space to not think about it is apparently what I need to solve the toughest of problems.

So sometimes, don’t think. Some people seem to be really good at this.

Tools for Thinking

I’m planning to expand this section into a separate post in the future, but here are a bunch of tools and tricks I rely on to help my thinking.

While the above steps are the basis needed to think in the first place, the tools below are what help me have “better” thoughts.

• Mental models: You may have heard of Pareto’s principle, aka the 80/20 rule, or Occam’s Razor, or Compounding. These are mental frameworks that might not always be true, but that allow you to see things in different lights. There are a lot of them. In theory, all that follows below could be considered a mental model.
• First principles: Break your thoughts down to the most basic truth. Dig at it for as long as you can until you discover the one raw fact that must be true. Strip away assumptions. Build from there.
• Socratic Questioning: Ask layered, open-ended questions to clarify, probe, explore and question.
• 5 Whys: Ask why until you discover the root cause behind a problem. The first, second or even third level is often not the true reason a problem appeared.
• Inversion: Do the opposite of what you were planning to do. Instead of asking how to succeed, ask yourself how to fail. Then avoid that.
• Reverse-engineering: Start from a finished system. Deconstruct it to see how it was built, then replicate (and improve) it with your own toolset.
• Feynman Technique: That’s what I am doing here. I want to learn how to think, so I teach it in simple terms to the reader. When I struggle to explain a part, I find gaps in my knowledge. I go back and improve.

There are many more tools in my toolset, but these are the ones I (try to) rely on the most. I’ll expand this into a separate post down the line, so subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed to get notified when it goes live!

Thinking is the most crucial skill we need to develop amidst our current, uncertain times. It will help us make sense of the mess of the world, and especially of the mess in our minds.

By becoming better thinkers, I’d argue we become better humans. And by becoming better humans, we’ll be able to make the world a better place.

None of this is easy. It requires a vast amount of effort from us, not only to take the time to think or improve our thinking, but also to reject what interferes with it.

It is probably why a lot of people will not do this. Instead, they might complain, shout at the clouds or simply give up. It is, after all, easier to feel defeatist than to struggle.

Those of us who hone this skill (and thinking is ultimately a skill) will learn a superpower that brings us ahead of the majority.

It’ll make us superhuman, and I strongly believe this.

So, go and practice thinking.

Some notes on AI: I bashed Generative AI, LLMs and algorithmic timelines a lot in this post.

The reason is I strongly believe we should not be offloading the skills that make us human to machines.

But I still use ChatGPT on a near-daily basis. The difference is that I (now) use it to complement my thinking. I use it for research (and then fact-check, because it still hallucinates a lot), I use it as a learning tool, or to see things from different angles by actively asking it to do so. It often fails, but sometimes it helps me.

Generative AI is a tool we need to learn how to use. I keep comparing LLMs to a friend who has a photographic memory and remembers everything. But he is also just plain stupid. He makes shit up. He doesn’t know what he is talking about, but just parrots what he learned by heart. (And memorizing ≠ understanding.) Sometimes he parrots something really intelligent, but that is more a coincidence than anything else. We just give this randomness more weight than we should, as we find it “magical”.

And as for algorithmic timelines: they are mostly shit. Their only worth is if you use them as a marketing tool.