A couple years before I started Wayshaping, I was talking with a friend who’s a therapist about some of my early thinking on life admin problems, and I shared an idea that had been stuck on my brain:

“To me, it seems like there’s a large amount of life admin pain that’s avoidable, but only if you plan ahead accordingly. Like it’s easiest if you’re sort of always looking ahead. So, why aren’t we taught in school how to identify where we’re headed in life and set a plan?”

She chuckled (with a hint of mild disdain) and responded, “Do people really need to plan their lives? Do you think you’re maybe just talking about wisdom? Perhaps we just live life—with plans, non-plans, mistakes, and all the rest—and we just deal with the logistical consequences. Maybe that’s the best we can do.”

I walked away feeling like she was mostly right – that she herself had a kind of wisdom I did not – but I also felt like I didn’t quite agree with something there.

It was the last part:

“...we just deal with the logistical consequences, and that’s the best we all can do.” 

"Having a life plan" is a tall order for anybody. I've come to believe that plans don't necessarily work for the wide majority of people. But I also do not think we’re all meant to just deal with the fallout of life admin consequences. The cost of time and energy is too great. That would mean some people are destined for life admin to just take up more and more of our time and energy.

After all, isn’t education precisely meant to help with situations like this? To gain wisdom that humanity believes should be passed down by something more efficient than experience? So that I can understand the consequences of certain actions, so that I myself don’t have to experience them? So that we, as humanity, aren’t stuck on the same problems over and over again?

As it turns out, humanity has many examples of subjects we learn to help us experience less work or pain later in life:

• We all have to test our driving skills in order to get a license, so that America doesn’t have a motor vehicle death rate of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 (which was the United States’ peak in 1937). 
• We all practice public-speaking in school because it’s much better to fail in the relative safety of the classroom than in adulthood, when a speech may play an important role in a career.
• Sexual health classes are designed to provide kids with the information they need during the time when it's relevant to help them understand their bodies.
• Many school kids participate in athletics to learn how to work as a team, to persevere, and to deal with failure, so that they’re better workers and citizens later on. 

Life admin is the counterexample: Young adults in modern society are not given enough practical ways to address the onslaught of admin. While there have been growing calls for formal financial education courses and digital literacy programming, the solutions in every life admin space are still developing and relatively nescient.

Perhaps the reason why we don’t have a “life admin class” in schools is because life admin is so inextricably tied to our choices. And unlike the examples above, the most established practices for navigating life choices come from the many far corners of human knowledge and experience: religion, philosophy, folklore, family, business, and even academia. 

There's no one method for life admin that's going to work for everybody universally. Instead, I think we're all left to discern what direction we want to take in life and how we want to manage the accompanying life admin. Humanity brings us many forms of practical wisdom (which we will survey below in this piece) but how we choose which forms of wisdom to pick up, how we apply those approaches to to our lives, and what we do when the wisdom seems to dry up—all we have is our capacity for discernment.

discernment is the individual mental work we all have to do to decide which approaches, examples, and ideas we choose to adopt in our own lives.

What we're trying to do with Wayshaping is to hold space for the many ways people successfully navigate life admin, so that you can discern which practices are worth adopting for your own path.

Humanity's many forms of practical wisdom can serve as guides for discernment

In America, it's common to ask children: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Physicians and psychologists have even tried to tie this question to different outcomes of well-being. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself, how do people come to answer this kind of question for themselves?

As a child, it may be a benign, playful question (albeit formative). As adults, what we do or don't do is a major part of a modern identity. It can be a source of pride, a source of shame, or even stress.

How we go about answering this kind of question is both a highly individual task and one steeped in human tradition. What's new is that today's world puts more onus on this kind of life-defining question than ever in history. Only 85 years ago (in 1940), 40% of people worked in agriculture; now less than 2% do. There's more and more onus on us, as individuals to choose a direction in life, rather than being guided. And that's not easy for everybody.

I've made an effort here to research and list six main sources of wisdom humanity has produced over time for guiding people to make life choices.

• Relying on relationships - as old as humankind
• Inner self-reflection - approaches from multiple branches of philosophy
• Following a belief system - formal and informal religious practices
• Engaging in formal study - traditions of academic practice
• Experiential learning - Enlightenment ideals of scientific method
• Goal-setting - drawn heavily from 20th century business practices

Each of these can be further segmented into different variations and practices, which means we certainly don't have a scarcity problem when it comes to established practical wisdom for shaping our lives. Instead, the challenge is figuring out which approaches will work best for you personally. That's a big part of discernment: What sources of wisdom do you listen to and what do you ignore?

Let's review these seven sources of practical wisdom for their pros, cons, and how they apply to life admin.

1. Relying on relationships

It's hard to be human and not rely on relationships to shape your ideas; it's the oldest practice there is.

Pro: People you have relationships understand the context and circumstances of your life, so they're some of the best positioned to give you appropriate guidance.

Con: Relationships also come with people's own interests, needs, and limitations. So, your existing relationships may not be able to take you everywhere you may want to go in life.

In life admin: It's not uncommon for people's first relationships with service providers to be entirely relationship-based. My first bank was my parents' bank. My first solo grocery shopping was certainly shaped heavily by family's choice of foods. Relationships are often our starting places for engaging with life admin.

2. Inner self-reflection

Ideas of introspection and inward thought have existed for millennia, and they’ve been further refined by modern psychological practices like mindfulness and cognitive behavioral techniques.‍

Pro: Self-reflection allows for personal clarity and insight. It helps you better define your own values, motivations, and goals, leading to more aligned decision-making. It can create mental space for navigating complex emotions.‍

Con: Relying solely on self-reflection can be isolating and may limit your exposure to new perspectives or ideas. Without external input, it’s easy to get stuck in your own biases or blind spots.‍

In life admin: Self-reflection plays a significant role in life admin when you pause to consider your financial habits, personal health, or time management. For example, reflecting on how you spend your time or how you feel about your finances can help you make necessary adjustments.

3. Following a belief system

‍Human beings have long turned to belief systems, whether formal religions or informal moral codes, to guide their life decisions.‍

Pro: Belief systems offer a structured approach to decision-making by offering a moral framework and tenets that can create clarity, especially when life's choices seem overwhelming.‍

Con: The rigidity of some belief systems can limit personal exploration, especially if the system doesn’t align with personal needs as time progresses.‍

In life admin: Many life admin tasks, like financial and healthcare decisions, can be heavily guided by belief systems. For instance, some religions guide how you approach charitable giving or your relationship with rest.

4. Engaging in formal study

From ancient monastic practices to modern academic institutions, formal study has long been considered a path to wisdom.‍

Pro: Formal education systems offer a structured, comprehensive way to gain both broad and specialized knowledge, providing a space for achievement outside of dominant capitalistic enterprises. People build whole careers via study and scholarly achievement.

Con: Theoretical knowledge from formal study can sometimes be disconnected from real-world application, making it harder to translate academic insights into practical decisions.‍

In life admin: Some life admin tasks are so complex that they almost necessitate some kind of formal study: tax filings, legal matters, major financial investments, etc. So, often our willingness to engage in formal study is also connected to our willingness to engage with others that have knowledge we don't have.

5. Following public policy

Governments have long published public guidelines or incentivized certain behaviors in the public. You can't understate the influence policies have on the extent and limitations of our life choices.

Pro: When you follow public policies closely, you can get distinct advantages. Take marriage as an example: legal marriage has long held key privileges in taxation, insurance coverage, and more. Another example is military service. People who have a military career are afforded many unique benefits.

Con: Public policy often values the nation and society over the individual. Many kinds of public servants and parts of the public affected by public policy also experience its restrictions.

In life admin: People who stick closely to public policy get the benefits of doing so, but often at the cost of having to pay with time and attention. A good example that affects many people is how current U.S. policy affects couples choosing to have children. Support for children is primarily via child-related tax credits, which are helpful, but require you to put in the work of claiming the credit and the value comes via refund once per year, instead of regularly throughout the year.

6. Experiential learning

Learning by doing, or experiential learning, comes from Enlightenment ideals of the scientific method and practical trial and error.‍

Pro: Experiential learning allows for hands-on understanding and personal adaptation. You gain knowledge from real-world consequences, which can lead to deeper, more lasting insights.‍

Con: The downside of experiential learning is that it can be slow and sometimes painful. Mistakes can be costly, and it often requires trial and error, which isn't always efficient.‍

In life admin: Much of life admin is learned through doing—whether it’s figuring out how to manage a household budget, deal with bureaucracy, or navigate healthcare. Each time you manage a new aspect of life admin, you gain experience that improves future decision-making.

7. Goal-setting

Business thinkers first started talking about goal-setting in 20th century business circles as a way of setting financial targets for future years. One 1981 article by George Doran, popularized the idea of "S.M.A.R.T. Goals" (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related) as a management technique. Since then, the idea of "setting goals" for oneself have filtered into educational and social contexts, whether appropriate or not.‍

Pro: Theoretically, the idea of identifying your goals and setting them on a timeline provides you with focus and a sense of direction, helping you prioritize tasks and allocate resources efficiently.‍

Con: It isn't always easy to articulate our goals when we need to. Sometimes we just don't know. Moreover, life is full of surprises, which are often bound to interrupt our ideal goal achievement, so what happens when we don't meet our goals? The sense of failure that can come when goals aren’t met can often lead us away from setting new goals. Goal-setting can also cause you to overlook flexibility, spontaneity, or unplanned opportunities.‍

In life admin: Many institutions and service providers expect people to know what they want and to have an organized list of their goals. Setting clear targets can help you keep track of what needs to be done, but it’s important to remain adaptable when life throws curveballs.

These sources help us understand life admin, but they don't filter it for us

Regardless of the sources of practical wisdom you use in your own life, they are just ways of understanding the world; they don't necessarily help us filter out the noise for our own lives.

"What if I don't plan to have children?" 

"What if I'm not interested in career that pays well?"

"What if I want to serve more than I want financial stability?"

"What if I want to live sustainably instead of living typically?"

All of these questions are valid thoughts from people I know, and conventional sources of wisdom don't always help answer them. That's where we each have to rely on personal discernment instead.

How discernment helps removes unnecessary life admin and focus us on what's important

Discernment has degrees of both disregarding paths you don't need to take and also trying to identify the paths in life you do want to take, even if they're not immediate.

Both aspects of discernment can help with the burden of life admin. If we take Wayshaping's categories of life admin: Life decisions, household management, healthcare, and personal finance, and education/career choices, there are many parts of these categories that public policy or religion or formal study might suggest should be important to you...even if they aren't.

Let's use the example of having a family, given its ubiquity in our culture.

Whether or not you would ever consider having children, the discernment around that choice can and likely will extend over time. Especially given that having a child can be planned, and a surprise, or require assistance, there's a great deal of variety in how people decide to become parents. It happens over different timelines and storylines.

In each of the categories of life admin, we're all shaped by the practical wisdom that we hear and have to discern which sources to listen to, which to ignore, and how to make choices for our own lives.

At the risk of taking something as personal as discernment to a pedantic level, you could even attempt to structure your thinking like this.

Illustrative example: Having a family

• Life decision-making:
  • Practical wisdom I'm hearing: Public health policies suggest that having children before a certain age can make it harder to have children biologically
  • Discernment: That doesn't match my priorities, and I value other things before having children.
• Household management:
  • Practical wisdom I'm hearing: My relationship with my parents set a pattern for how two partners lead a household
  • Discernment: My spouse and I have set goals for sharing the labor of a household equally and with flexibility as we also pursue careers, so we're looking to be more intentional about carefully sharing household work
• Healthcare:
  • Practical wisdom I'm hearing: Our friends have talked a lot about what healthcare during pregnancy should look like, a lot of which comes from public health guidelines.
  • Discernment: I think that some of the burden of pregnancy healthcare information is likely to overwhelm me and negatively impact my mental health during pregnancy, so I'm going to try to prioritize the most important matters.
• Personal finance:
  • Practical wisdom I'm hearing: I followed a lot of personal financial education I got early on, so I've saved and been pretty prepared for having a family now that the time has come
  • Discernment: I'm glad I made that choice. How might I carry forward similar choices in future years?
• Education / career plans:
  • Practical wisdom I'm hearing: Working a government job, I've always followed the stability and guidelines of working in the public sector.
  • Discernment: Government work gives us a level of financial stability that I like and a degree of satisfaction that I could see taking me through my working years.

As you can see in each category, there are parts of practical wisdom traditions that we disregard and parts that we accept for the valuable ability to help us navigate life's complexity. This intentional disregarding, when well informed, is often a big time-saver.

Especially with an example as momentous as having a child, much of the latest public health discourse says many parents are overly concerned about doing everything perfectly; they're parenting (and preparing for parenting) too intensely and have yet to find a nice middle ground.

But that's just one example. Discernment is part of navigating life no matter what key decisions or life moments are coming up for you.

Discernment is continual: Never stop revisiting your ideas about life

One of the things emphasized in the deepest historical traditions of discernment is thinking of it as a practice. The Ignatian tradition promotes the idea of daily practice and thinking of discernment as a regular set of exercises.

If that didn't seem like a lot of daily work and focus, I might ascribe to that idea. Regardless of how often, I think the important piece of discernment is to identify a way to keep the continuity going—to keep checking in with yourself—and if you're in a relationship to check in with your spouse or partner too.

If you're able to discern how you want to live your life, you'll certainly be able to shape your way through the life admin of it all. I think the mistake we tend to make in modern life is to treat the admin as sterile logistics, rather than tasks that are full of meaning and consequence.

We have traditions and culture around having a child or getting married, which imbue them with meaning and a degree of sacredness. We don't tend to under-recognize the hugeness of the life admin the prelude and follow these kinds of moments.

Discernment helps you give them their due weight and allows you decide what to take on.