Identify the goals you actually need to reach.
Prioritize them.
Divide each into tactically achievable targets.

Existence versus survival.

There is inanimate matter. And there’s life.
Living things – read ‘organisms’ – consist of inanimate matter and remain alive for only as long as they are able to function according to a species specific ‘set of rules’. Species specific yet individually formulated instructions coded by the genetic material governing each organism.
Matter is mainly about existence. No two things can exist in the exact same place AND most of the inanimate matter is not influenced by time. There are a few exceptions but they are defined by our understanding of time rather than anything else.

Life is mostly about survival.
Individual living organisms survive only if the information contained inside their genetic material is compatible with the environment in which they happen to be. And, regardless, they do survive, most of them, for only a limited amount of what we call time.
Species, on the other hand, evolve. Survive only for as long as they are able to update the information they carry along from generation to generation. The updating mechanism, natural evolution, is governed by rules but essentially depends on pure luck.

“Innocent til proven guilty“

By whom…?

Living organisms behave as if ‘enjoying’ a certain degree of self-awareness.
They keep their insides in and most of the outside out. All this while minutely managing what goes in and what goes out, according to their metabolic needs. The point being that most living organisms do accomplish these tasks innocently. They just follow the instructions they came up with for as long as this remains possible.

It so happened that layers and layers of evolution after life sprung up have produced what we call ‘consciousness’. A self-awareness sophisticated enough to observe itself while committing ‘the act’. To ‘observe itself observing‘, as Humberto Maturana had described it.

The simple advent of consciousness has opened a completely fresh can of worms.

No longer linear.

Time doesn’t flow for inanimate matter. It either exists or not.
Time flows linearly for innocent life. Organisms are born, live and die without having much individual contribution to the whole thing. Except for being cannon fodder for evolution.
Which evolution is – used to be, more precisely – linear. Just as linear as time.

No longer.
As we, human beings, have developed what we have called consciousness… things have become way more complicated than they used to be.
Since we have noticed death…

I promised yesterday an explanation.
A putative evolutionary explanation for why fallacies have survived. Survived us realizing their falsitude…