Introduction

This, that and everything in between - Like I have said many times before, life can be incredibly messy, confusing and overwhelming. And although this experience as a symptom can sometimes be solved by just cleaning your room, planning out your next day and eating a proper meal, this superficial order often falls apart just as quickly again. And so the question arises: how can we create and secure some fundamental level of order in our lives that is capable of resisting and outlasting the disturbances of the present day? In this blog-post, I give you an introduction to the mental model of the map of life, explain to you how it works and how this metaphor can help us cope with moments and phases of confusion.

This post covers...

1. ❓ What it is
2. ⚙️ How it works
3. 🧿 How to practically build & use it
4. 🌍 Conclusion

What it is

The map of life is a mental model and a visual metaphor for looking at the whole of our lives from a bird's eye perspective.

To stress my point, it is about abstracting the entirety of your life into a graspable map so that despite all the specific bits of information you are confronted with in your everyday life, you have the perspective to put these specific bits of information into context, understand how they fit into your life as a whole, see where and how they may come in as useful and with all that being able to make better decisions on what may actually be useful for you to spend your time on today.

Additionally, the map of life allows you to see whether or not your life contains any major imbalances by helping you see where your strengths as well as your weaknesses lie. This way you can strategically set goals and delegate your time.

How it works

Practically, the map of life follows the same principle of any other map. You have a certain territory the map displays and beyond the boarders of the map remains the unknown.

Different to a regular map though, the map of life doesn't display the physical territory you have explored in your life up until this point, but rather the territory you have explored in the terms of experience and knowledge aquistion. And instead of being fixed, your map of life is a living and responsive organism that changes and evolves over time.

The map of life displays the areas of your life. The space these areas take up in your map of life simply depend on how much experience and knowledge you have already gained in these areas.

When you were a toddler, your map of life was probably very limited and at the time, you probably didn't even have enough consciousness to be able to separate your experience into clear categories such as "health", "relationships" and "work" for example.

As you grew older and are continuing to grow older though, you add more and more experience to your map, add more and more details and hopefully are able to reflect on these experiences more and more deeply. As a result, your map of life expands, now includes totally new areas such as spirituality for example but also greatly expands on the level of detail of previously existing areas.

As a teenager, the area "relationships" of your map of life may have primarily consisted of a few hook up lines you picked up somewhere and were able to land a few dates with. But then you married, had kids and now this area of relationships has these entirely new branches called "marriage" and "family" for example.

What is important to note here is that the map of life is not an attempt to create a universal encyclopaedia of life. And although it shares the fact that the map of life attempts to give a universal overview, this overview remains deeply tailored to you and your experience and doesn't explain all of that experience in too much detail for the sake of clarity.

How to practically build & use it

Whether you actually attempt to physically map out this map of life on a sheet of paper or whether or not you just nurture and maintain this map of life mentally in your head is totally your own choice.

Equally, the way you choose to categorize your experiences is something you need to decide yourself, too. For now, it has made sense for me personally to setup my map of life in a tree structure and then separate my experience by topics such as "health", "relationships", "work" and so on, which then have different, ongoing sub-branches.

The key here is to always remember the purpose of the map of life: to provide clarity and give a clear overview. Since your map of life only needs to serve you and no one else, don't obsess over building a perfect map.

You won't always immediately think about your map of life when you gain new information, new experiences or learn new lessons. And that's fine. By definition your map of life grows and changes with you. But if you simply keep it running in the background and activate it from time to time in moments of reflection, it may seriously help you see the bigger picture of your life, understand where you are going and how you might want to adjust the direction of your present choices.

Conclusion

Life is messy and it is easy to feel confused or overwhelmed when we are so stuck in the moment itself that we become blind to the big-picture of our lives. As a result, we overvalue the present moment and the things happening right in front of us and we don't understand how or if the things we are concerning ourselves with right now are important at all for our future.

The map of life is an attempt of a remedy to solve the core of the problem rather than just treating symptoms. By providing an easy to understand visual reference to structure and organize our experiences, the map of life provides the space to take a step back, breath and look at our lives as a whole.