(2025-05-12) Karlsson What Problem Should You Be Working On Now

Henrik Karlsson: What problem should you be working on now? At 25, when Johanna and I bought a house and had to pick an internet provider, we decided to go with the smallest data plan, 5 GB a month. I can recommend it.

When we ran out of data, as we did after two weeks each month, I would make a to-do list where I wrote down everything I wanted to do on the internet. After 3-4 days, I’d walk down to the library, open my notebook, and read:
Look up Justin Bieber’s net worth

What? Why did I think that was a good problem to spend three minutes of my life on?

It made me wonder how much of my life I waste on nonsense.

I discussed this with Torbjörn, my Rammstein-loving and intellectually hyper-attuned friend, and he had an idea for an app. It would work like this: whenever you clicked something on your computer or your phone, instead of opening, it would be appended to the bottom of your to-do list. You’d click on a YouTube video of Alan Watts talking about what reality is, and your to-do list would open. To proceed to the video, you’d have to manually upvote watching the video past hanging with your girlfriend and paying your bills to confirm that the video was a higher priority for you than anything else you knew of.

We never built this torture machine, but what I’m saying, Katariina, is that we often already know which problems matter if we just stop to think about it.

There is something like a value structure inside of us—a web of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, goals, ethical principles, and so on—that we can tap into. It will rank order our options for us and tell us what matters, if we want. In moments of clarity, we can make contact with that value structure, and it will tell us, in no uncertain terms, that almost everything we do is irrelevant.

Most of the time, I am only loosely connected with my deeper values and so can’t assign things their proper place. I lose myself in whatever comes my way.

Johanna often asks me a question that helps when I’m lost like this. She says, quite simply, “What is the problem you should be working on now?”

It sounds too simple to work. But when I’m in my office and ask myself the question, I nearly always realize I’m working on the wrong thing. And if I ask it again half an hour later, guess if I haven’t drifted and am working on the wrong thing again. So, ideally, I should ask myself twice an hour. (start of every pomodoro?)

This now reminds me that what I’m looking for is not the truth about my soul; I’m just looking for the next iteration of the experiment that is my life.

I’m not saying that reconnecting with your values like this will automatically reveal which problems are worth solving and which are worth quitting.

What I’m saying is that the habit of taking a step back to articulate my value hierarchy and then prioritize my options—that habit has been useful, for me, in building the necessary self-awareness and know-how. Each time I’ve interrupted my automatic decisions by looking at the larger picture and prioritizing, I’ve had another chance to see my value structure more clearly; it has gradually come into view.

In another essay, I referred to this loop as “running a million small experiments trying to figure out the composition of this object that is [you]”—introspection by doing. It can be punishing. But if you do it for ten years, it is hard not to reach some clarity about your priorities. What matters will rise up from the mess. (meta-cognition)