We often hear about people who are “searching for something” or “feeling lost”. Perhaps we feel it ourselves. The wording used is far from incidental. In fact, it’s spot on: life is a search. A search for meaning, a search to be the best version of yourself, a search for a better situation for your family. There is some place you are at, and some place else you would like to be. Your destiny. But searching in the high-dimensional space of life is not an easy task.

The space of life can be discretized down to the moments of action. Actions are the building blocks of life, they are forces which have the power to invoke change. Change in your position in the graph of life. Every action is the manifestation of a decision, either purposeful or unconscious. Even inaction is a decision, moving you to a new node, with potentially fewer options. If you can graph life as a series of actions, with the potential to invoke change, then you can understand that all actions have power.

In each waking moment, you have the power to choose. In the directed graph of life, with high degree, you have many options to choose from:

• to binge that tv show
• to send that work email
• to go to the gym
• to get that oil change you’ve needed to,
• to call your mom,
• to drink,
• to sleep,
• etc.

There are many, many options to choose from. But how can you choose?

This search requires an implicit sense direction in the space of life. A compass to guide you in your actions. If every decision were be weighted equally, choices would be left to chance, resulting in a depth first exploration of life without a visited list, capable of getting stuck in cycles. Similarly, life is too complex to be explored breadth-first: the graph degree is too high.

Life is a best-first search, guided by an implicit query: what you are searching for. At each step along this path of life, you make the decision which best leads you to this query. And the query is hand-crafted by you: it’s your goals, your morals, your ethics, your ideals, and your wishes. It’s what you want out of life. Your query may not truly exist among the realm of truly possibilities, but it can still be used to guide you. So long as your query is sufficiently realistic, it can be used as a surrogate to guide your decisions.

So how do you craft this query? Well, I’m still working on that. It’s clear the query is a manifestation of what you want: it must embody your set of principles, your beliefs, your goals. It must be carefully developed under a system of values. And even after developing the query, you need the correct distance measure: your query will have several facets, those affecting the different parts of your life. Some decisions will impact some of them, others many of them. Some may be weighted differently.

You craft your personal query so you have an orientation in this world, in this life. You make decisions with a purpose, a conscious purpose. People feel lost because they don’t know how they got where they are, and they don’t know where they’re heading. They’re not in control. Put yourself in the driver’s seat: craft your query.

Notes:

• This graph of life has a temporal direction, monotonically progressing. The temporal direction represents the changes in the graph: addition of new nodes, deletion of links, etc. Can this interpretation be useful for dynamic graph updates?
• Crafting queries… is this useful?
• Distances with multiple goals…