031 | How to actually question your entire life - THE FINAL ASCENSION
Rebuilding our way back from rock bottom.
The essay you’re about to read is the conclusion to last week’s post, How to actually question your entire life: A seven-layer post that pulled us into the depths of our own psychology.
This week’s post takes us back up through the layers we just descended.
Throughout this journey, we started at the most visible, recognizable, easy-to-understand layer - working our way down to the deepest caverns of our own philosophy. What you may not expect is how digging down and climbing back up are explored using the same ladder.
Every layer caused the one above it.
We dug past your decisions to find the defaults that produced them.
Your defaults existed as a symptom of your assumptions.
Your assumptions were remnants of the stories you tell yourself (narratives), which are often written by the hand of desires.
Your desires were simply the byproduct of your values.
Underneath it all lies a ticking death clock.
We tore these layers apart from top to bottom, but they can only be rebuilt from the bottom-up. The first time your worldview was constructed, the deepest, most fundamental layer wasn’t even a thought. Values were installed in you before you could speak, and these values started outlining your desires. Your desires filled in the personal story, and your story was the foundation of your assumptions. The assumptions ran themselves as defaults. The defaults hardened themselves while the forked paths of those defaults are what actually revealed themselves as everyday decisions.
Everything you believe about the world stems from a foundation poured before you ever knew something was about to be built on top of it. But now we’re here, sitting at the very bottom of it all, looking up at the archaeological fragments of our past. You can see every layer at a glance.
Now we’re going back up.
And for the first time, you get to choose how to rebuild it.
Start with the clock. The inevitable death we all must face. It’s the only layer we can’t reshape, but we can learn to use this understanding as a tool rather than a crippling fear. You will die, and you have no clue when, but that’s no reason to flinch every time you think about it.
Let mortality do its job as the most honest editor you’ll ever have. It strikes out everything that doesn’t matter, and the trivial things get shaved away. What’s left is a pretty damn short menu of all the things that were ever worth your finite attention. This is your new North, your compass. Everything that comes next is built to serve it.
Climb one rung to find your values. You learned many of these were inherited or installed- be it from our upbringing, to our education, to the scoreboards of games you never agreed to play. With the death clock on your wrist, audit each value, one at a time. With each value that runs your life, simply ask:
“If I truly understood my time here was finite, would I still measure my life by this?”
Some values will survive. Keep them around. They’re still yours, but now they’re actively chosen, not just absorbed.
Some values will die. Let them go. Congrats, you just did something few grown adults ever do: you edited the entire criteria for which to judge your life by.
Now we ascend to desires. This rung is easier now that we’ve reshaped our values. Desires run downstream - fix your values and the desires start to fall into place with little effort. The many wants that came from old values are slowly losing their grip on you. You stop dreaming about the office you just wanted to be seen working from, or the beautiful woman you wanted to be seen dating. The shallow desires melt away - not through brute force, but through removing the chains that held the toxic ones in place.
Next, we’ll reshape your narrative. Now you get to re-write your own story, instead of inheriting it from a past self. Your new story won’t always be a flattering one, but it’ll be closer to the truth.
The old story looks at the place you ended up and attempts to justify it. The new one looks forward: “this is what I’ve decided to value, so here is what I want out of life, and here’s why”. It focuses on the present moment and how to create a better future. It’ll be a story that runs downstream from your chosen values; one that provides detail instead of defenses.
Let’s climb to assumptions. Now that your story is rewritten, your assumptions start to break themselves loose from a set of rusty, outdated handcuffs. Your prior notions about the world become questions rather than statements. “Life is organized around my work” becomes “do I want my life to be organized around my work? Maybe, maybe not - but the point here is that your relationship to your career (or any part of life, for that matter) becomes a conscious decision that fits you personally. Your life can start to serve you, not the other way around.
Next is your defaults. This is the place where abstractions start to materialize in the physical world. Every layer below it is now flowing into the thousands of small, automatic processes that make up your days. The mornings you spend on autopilot can be rebuilt to match the layers supporting it. Your defaults are no longer “the way life is”, but something you’re actively shaping and executing on your own behalf.
At last, we’re back at the topsoil: decisions. The only layer most people ever look at. For you, your choices are no longer the only thing under examination - they’re the final output of everything else you’ve already examined underneath. They rest on the defaults you chose, on an overarching frame of assumptions you questioned, stemming from a story you deliberately authored, built from desires that are truly your own, rooted in values you audited… all balanced over the morbid realization that this might just be the only life we ever get. The one you used to turn a blind eye to. The topsoil is still topsoil, but now you know what’s under it, because you put it there.
Most things in life aren’t truly settled after all. They just get buried, until we forget it’s something we can unearth. If you dig it up, you can lay it down again - this time with purpose, with your own hands, forming a new set of strata that supports your life better than it ever could before.
I can show you the layers, but I can’t pick up the shovel for you. You’re the only one who gets to find out how deep your well truly goes.
You owe it to yourself to start digging. It’s a daunting task, I know. There’s no guessing what you’ll uncover, but have faith you’ll be able to find your way home.
I’ll be waiting for you at the surface.
-KPG