Life can feel like a never-ending cycle of “just getting through it” sometimes.
You wake up, check notifications on your phone and go back to sleep for another half an hour until you’ve slept so much that you’re tired again. You look at the clock and see that it’s almost time for work. You continue to wait until you’re officially running late. Now you get dressed in a hurry and rush out the door, barely making it to work on time.
At work, you’re just thinking about how nice it’s going to be when you get back home. The work day creeps by at a snail’s pace, but eventually, you’re back at home, where you can watch TV, eat junk food, scroll through social media, drink a glass of wine and pass out, only to repeat the same process the following day.
This is a process that leaves no time for you to follow your passion.
You might feel guilty after a night of extreme indulgence, where you feel like you didn’t do anything of value the previous day. You might beat yourself up about the fact that you didn’t work on anything that contributed to your higher purpose.
Maybe the childhood vision you had of yourself as a world-renowned artist is in the back of your consciousness, shaking its head at the person you’ve become as it slowly fades away from the possibility of existence.
The truth is, a large chunk of society lives exactly like this. We work at jobs we don’t want to work, only so that we can go home and fry our minds on TV and social media. Each day we’re just getting through it, working tirelessly toward nothing of real value. You can even be aware of the fact that you’re in an unending cycle of torment, yet you continue to perpetuate it. Why?
Because it’s easy. It’s easy to take the path of least resistance. Our culture is in a state where it’s common and socially acceptable to hate your job. Everyone actively engages with social media, a system designed to be addictive. We’re constantly bombarded with advertisements that tell us that they have the answer to their happiness: A nice cold beer or a fruity-smelling designer perfume or a magic pill.
The way our society is built makes it all too easy to live a purposeless life. But there is hope.
The first step toward breaking out of a mind-numbing, purposeless life is to recognize the fact that you aren’t satisfied with it. Once you recognize there’s a problem, you can work toward chipping away at it until it’s gone.
You might ask, “Where do I start?” To this question, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you already know what you need to do. The bad news is that you probably don’t want to do it.
If you were to sit down and be honest with yourself about the things that you could do to improve your life, there would be a handful of actions that would come to mind. Maybe you could start by fixing your diet; perhaps you stop eating junk foods. Maybe you could cut back on your media consumption or pursue an old hobby that used to bring you joy.
But we don’t act on these decisions because we understand that it would be an effort. It’s easy to lay in your bed for too long and veg out watching funny YouTube skits. It’s easy to pull out your phone and scroll through social media “just for a second” during work. It’s easy to drink just one beer when you get home (but one turns into two, which turns into three…).
All of these low-vibration activities are easy, but they aren’t fulfilling.
In contrast, if you worked toward pursuing those hobbies that brought you a spark of joy and fulfillment as a kid, you’d start to see your life flourish. Passion can reinvigorate your life.
For example, I remembered that I enjoyed writing stories in school when I was a kid. If I was given a project to tell a story, I would spend hours trying to make it perfect. I wanted to tug at the emotions of the reader with dramatic storylines that caused their cheeks to tsunami with tears. But for the longest time, I stopped writing.
It was only in my community college, when taking a Gen-Ed course, that I encountered a professor that gave me a C on an essay I wrote. I didn’t try particularly hard on that essay, but the grade hurt my ego nonetheless. I was used to professors giving me A’s on the half-baked pieces of work I’d turn in.
So in my next essay, I tried my best, putting hours of work into a biographical essay about my journey in grappling with my sense of self. About how I wanted to be successful to impress others, about how I struggled with an inferiority complex to my brother and about how I felt like a failure to be attending community college when my friends were going to faraway, beautiful universities.
I put my heart and soul into this essay, and time melted past as I wrote it. When I turned it in to my professor, I got the A that I was looking for. He even encouraged me to enter it into a writing contest—and I did—and it won the second-place prize. And I’ve been writing ever since.
But I don’t write solely so that others acknowledge my work. I write because it brings me joy and fulfillment that I can’t get anywhere else. I’m working toward writing a book and I’m writing this blog. Both of these activities make me feel like I’m working on creating something of substance. Something that will exist beyond me, even when my body decays six feet beneath the ground.
And in order to create high-quality work, I need to have a decent attention span. If I took out my phone every five minutes while writing to scroll through TikTok, I’d never get anything done. So I’ve uprooted social media from my life, deleted all of my accounts and put my phone in a makeshift phone jail (my sock drawer) when it’s time to write.
In order to create high-quality work, I also need to take care of myself physically and mentally. If I’m always stressed about my job or I feel under the weather because I haven’t been eating healthy foods, then that’s going to interfere with my energy levels and ability to focus.
This is why I choose to eat at least two complete, nutritious meals a day and keep a bullet journal where I organize the to-dos of my job. Because the more I take care of my body and mental health, the more I can dedicate myself to quality writing.
But why is it that I will sacrifice so much for writing? Because I enjoy the process. Writing nourishes me creatively and feeds my overall sense of purpose. And the fruits of my labor are more valuable to me than the act of scrolling on social media or watching TV. Writing makes me feel fulfilled.
This isn’t to say that you need to start writing.
This is to say that you should pursue hobbies that bring you genuine happiness and fulfillment. This is the secret behind finding the desire to change your life. When you find something that you love more than social media and binge-eating, it will encourage you to get those parts of your life in order.
At the end of the day, however, nothing will change until you’re ready to make it change. And even if you find a passion that fulfills you, your life likely won’t change overnight. The impact that writing had on my life took years to come to fruition fully.
But you should still search for the activities that make your heart flutter with excitement. And you should try your best to do those things that you know would contribute to you living your higher purpose. Think about the dreams you had as a child. Do those still bring you excitement? If so, maybe you should try working toward those dreams for a little bit and see what happens.
You might just find that you enjoy yourself along the way.