Did you want to do what you did?

When is the last time you realized that you didn’t decide to do what you just spent two hours doing?

For example, when you want to find some numbers in an old email and instead find yourself half an hour later responding to yet another unrelated email.

Or, you open Facebook while riding the subway only to miss your stop and wind up late to your destination.

Or, you have a thought mid-day about how humans rarely decide how to spend their time and instead the world around typically decides. And then you feel compelled to share the thought with others.

What we encounter dictates most of what we do. About the only line of defense is to hope to become aware and to say no I don’t want to be doing this, no matter how tempting it is.

Don’t believe this applies to you? How many political discussions have you had this last week?

Did you explicitly decide the topics, or, did headlines decide for you?