Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in your mind would be:

Where am I?
How do I know it?
What should I do?

These are the fundamental questions we evade.

The first two are questions on awareness— what I am doing now is more important than what I should do. Consider it like navigation on your car. The GPS needs to figure out your current location before it guides you to the desired location.

For example, you might want to appreciate and accept the fact that you are pre-diabetic to reverse the diabetes and sign-up for a program. Where am I? maybe I am on the heavier side! How would I know? Weighing scale, perhaps.

The third question is a question about taking action. And an answer that we always have is “What everyone else is doing”.

Take the same example. If you are on the heavier side and you have confirmed that you are overweight using a weighing scale, you quickly jump to considering exercise because you feel that’s what everyone else is doing. What you should do can’t come directly from what others are doing!!

Maybe a better diet plan work for you. Perhaps a less stressful life or cut down on food ordering. What you should do is contextualized to your reality.

Source: Ayn Rand (author of “Fountain Head”), also has a book on Philosophy titled “Philosophy, who needs it”.