"When in doubt, wait it out." (Michael Eigen)

"All this lasted a long time, or a short time: for properly speaking, there is no time on earth for such things." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", Part. IV Sec.12)

"Take your time. Think a lot. Think of everything you've got. For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not." (Cat Stevene, aka: Yusef)

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A lot of the stuff "people" get all worked up about in this world would simply go away if they didn't bother about them, like men getting haircuts. Eventually the guy would either go bald and die or die before going bald, and his hair would go with him. Too much and a quick snip with a pair of scissors would stop the world from ending without the dude having to make a perigrination to a Barbarian shop and expend his time and money getting lots of little hair snippets irritating his neck until he would take an otherwise unnecessary shower. And then each of the hairs regrows and he has to come back again for another round of the same crap. BFD.

There are times when one needs to make a quick decision, for instance: if your physician diagnoses you have Burkitt's lymphoma, where the cancer cells double ever 24 hours (). But much of the busyness people do is not so time dependent or even matters at all – like all those haircuts, people buying new fashion clothes, women putting on makeup, teachers giving kids homework assignments^[1], etcetera and so forth.

The IBM System 360 model 91 computer (the supercomputer of its time) had an interesting hardware feature: Whenever the hardware encountered a choice in the computer program it was executing, it would decode the subsequent instructions for both sides of the fork in the road. This was called "instruction lookahead". So, whichever way you were going to go, the computer was ready for you to get there, instead of waiting for you to make your choice and then only processing the one path that was selected. Presumably this was "expensive", but a capitalist economy wastes a lot on the potlatch social custom of competition, so why not instead deploy abundance of resources intelligently proactively to prepare for different possible eventualities? Instead of a lot of people all competing separately to do the same thing the same way, each could strive by a different path (possibly even for different goals), and when a given alternative ceased to have promise of being a good solution, intelligently to drop it from the mix (rather than letting causality take its course and amentedly choose the winner).

When in doubt, wait it out.

So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know." (François Rabelais)

When in doubt, wait it out. Haste makes waste.