Your Life Priority Stack Is Wrong If…

Your life priority stack is how you filter your life. 

It works in stages. Kind of like a giant stack of filters. Plural.

And it’s really important to step back and think about them from time to time. 

Because every idea you have, every relationship you engage with, and every action you take - they all get passed through some version of your life priority stack, with or without your conscious considerations. 

I don’t have a model for this. I don’t have a course to sell you on mapping yours out. I just know that each filter, at each level of your stack, will determine what is getting through and what is getting filtered out of your life. 

I’m thinking of life priority stacks because I’m seeing a lot of out of whack life priority stacks these days. I’m also hearing a lot about “polarization,” and seeing friends post, “I can’t even talk to them anymore” about family members again. It’s like there’s an election coming up or something. 

So here’s the one rule I know for making sure your life priority stack is well-functioning:

THINGS TO KEEP HIGH IN YOUR LIFE PRIORITY STACK: “small” social/relationship stuff, including family, friends, people you admire, people you’d want to admire you, and the healthy settings that nurture and nourish these small-scale social relationships.

THINGS TO KEEP LOW IN YOUR LIFE PRIORITY STACK:  “large” branded entities that are bigger than anything you can realistically expect to control, including political parties, corporations, sports teams, musical genres, celebrities, and the healthy settings that nurture and nourish these large-scale social relationships. 

NOTE: it’s not an in or out, it’s a high or low, in terms of relative priority! The goal here is remembering what matters to you. Keep healthy boundaries, but keep smart filters, stacked in order of priority to keep a good life moving forward. 

A (fun) example:

I like pizza. I like people that like pizza. Most people like pizza. If I didn’t like people that didn’t like pizza at all, I would have had to ban one of my nephews from my life a few years ago. 

But, since I stack “nephews” higher than “pizza-likers” - I got to help convert him from pizza is weird, to pizza is cool, to (most recently) pizza chef. First cheese, and now pepperoni. Imagine that!

SMALL relationships I can control belong HIGH on my stack. LARGE labels I can’t control, like anti-pizza lobbyists, belong not just LOW on my stack, but filtered out altogether. Keep life moving forward in the right direction.  

A (real) example:

My wife showed me a Facebook post about political parties messing up families again. One person is all-one party. The other is all-not that party. It doesn’t even matter which party, because it’s such a large filter, and so defiantly distant from either of these two otherwise nice people’s control. 

If “political party” is stacked above family - that’s a source of potentially bad polarization, and a source of people getting filtered out unnecessarily. 

Note - the party in question wasn’t the Nazis. Again, have healthy boundaries. But still, here is the point - 

The life priority stack and the order of the filters matter greatly here in what’s going to happen to this family in the months and years ahead. If large identity labels like political parties remain higher on their life priority stacks than small identity relationships like family, people are going to stop talking. Polarization is going to win.  

And for what? This is what makes me sad. This is what makes me mad. 

I’ll keep beating this drum - yes, have healthy boundaries - but don’t set your filters so aggressively or out of line priority-wise that you can’t help yourself and others move the world forward. 

Step back. Look at the life priority stack. Ask how it moves you, and all of us forward. 

That’s all I’m asking. 

Keep your life priorities well stacked, please. I’m trying too.