Life doesn't come with a manual.
But sometimes it helps to have somewhere to make sense of things.
Somewhere to look at what is actually going on, and decide what, if anything, you want to do about it.
What would you like to understand better?
Nothing you write here is sold, and you do not need an account to begin.
Where people usually start
Trying to work out what is actually true.
Why a small thing keeps coming back.
Whether a decision made years ago still fits.
What you are protecting, and who you are protecting it for.
Why somebody close to you sees the same thing completely differently.
Why a life that looks fine does not quite feel fine.
My Tree
The loudest thing today is not your whole life.
My Tree is somewhere to step back and look at the life you are actually living. What it began with, the person carrying it, the parts being lived now, what they add up to, what may still grow, and what reaches you from outside and gives something back.
It is not a score and it is not a balance wheel. It is your life, in your own words, and nothing in it moves unless you write it.
Choose any part of the Tree to see what it represents.
The Alternative Is Unthinkable
Most of us rule something out without noticing we did it.
There is usually a version of a situation we have quietly decided is not available. Sometimes for good reasons. People depend on us, the money is not there, we gave our word. Sometimes only because we said it once, years ago, and never went back to it.
The point is not to choose the alternative. It is to notice which alternatives you stopped examining, and why. Some of them you will look at again and close for good reasons. That counts as an answer.
Looking at it again is not a promise to do anything. The other way might be staying, leaving, repairing, accepting, waiting, preparing, or seeing the same situation differently and carrying on.
Every alternative costs something. Knowing what it would cost is more use than pretending there is a free version.
What is already good
Looking properly does not only turn up problems.
Often it turns up something that has been working for years and has never once been said out loud. A friendship that survived everything. Work that suits you better than you admit. An ordinary Tuesday you would miss immediately if it went.
Worth knowing, because the things nobody names are the things people forget to protect.
Sunlight
Some of what keeps a life alive was never an achievement.
People, places, beauty, music, food, weather, affection, being somewhere you like being. None of it appears on a record of what you have done, and a life can be well arranged and still short of it.
There is nothing to measure here and nothing to increase. It is only worth being able to say what yours is, so you notice when it has gone quiet.
Other people
Everybody is standing in their own life.
TAIU helps you get curious about somebody else. It does not tell you who they are and it cannot speak for them.
You were shaped by people, and what you decide reaches people. Understanding where somebody else is standing usually changes a conversation more than being right does.
Where did you grow up?
What was it actually like?
Who had the biggest influence on you?
What did money mean in your family?
What makes you happiest now?
New growth
Alternatives rarely arrive while you sit still.
They tend to come in sideways. A different city, an unfamiliar room, somebody whose life looks nothing like yours, a thing you tried once and were bad at.
Nobody is required to be growing. There is nothing to plan here. It is only worth knowing that curiosity is how most people find the option they could not see.
Ways to use TAIU
Four ways in, and they are not a ladder. Talking it through helps you work something out. Working through it helps you work on something. An exercise is a short piece of writing you do alone, and My Tree is where any of it can be kept.
The book
The thinking behind TAIU.
The Alternative Is Unthinkable is about the questions people carry and rarely get asked. What enough looks like. What a decision is really costing. What somebody has quietly decided is no longer available to them.
Written from years of meeting people in different countries and different circumstances, building things, losing some of them, changing direction, and never once meeting anybody who had it all sorted. The book explores the thinking. TAIU gives you somewhere to use it. Neither needs the other.
Where this leaves you
You are allowed to look without deciding anything.
Some people come away wanting to change something. Some come away wanting to protect something. Some still do not know, and leave it for now.
And sometimes looking properly says that nothing needs changing. That is an answer as well.