“What the hell am I supposed to do in the next 3 hours?”

It’s 9 PM. Sitting on the bed, alone, he blankly stares into a wall. His evening plans got canceled out of the blue and with him usually in bed at midnight, this cumbersome dilemma rears its ugly head.

Having no clue about what he wants, an uncomfortable urge comes knocking: “I have to do something. I must do something.” The more he tries to figure it out, the more out of ideas he is, while the thought keeps coming back: “Fuck, I need to do something…”

It’s 12.15am. Alone, with the same blank stare, but now he’s lying in bed. For the past 3 hours, he was binge-watching a stupid TV show. Like a sudden, chilly rain of April violently banging on the roof of your car, his mind starts raining explanations: “You had to do something.” “Maybe next time choose a better show.” “It was still better than doing nothing.” You can’t just sit in silence, doing nothing, like some wise-ass Buddhist monk.”

At this point, dear reader, you might be asking yourself who the hell is this weird guy?

He is you.

He is me.

He is us.

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Does the above story sound new to you? I doubt it. To me and to the people I talked to, it’s very real. It’s what happens on a daily basis. You wake up. You get a fresh set of 24 hours. What are you gonna do? Fill them with activities the best you can. You must do something. You need to do something.

This do-something drive allowed us to make progress. It allowed our ancestors to build the world as we know it today. However, their desire for more came mostly from inspiration, from wanting to do more, to have more, to conquer more just for the sake of it. As you look around you today, people still go out and want more, do more and try to acquire more. Yet, if you look beyond the surface, you can clearly start seeing one crucial difference between us and our ancestors: We often try to do more and have more just to escape. Our ancestors were running from saber-tooth tigers, while we are mostly running from… ourselves.

Me constantly checking my Facebook news feed, that “positive” guy seeing only the good of the world and a miserable millionaire killing himself day and night for even more money… it’s all an escape.

We HAVE to do something all the time, otherwise, something bad will happen, right? Umm, not necessarily… but more on that later. Let’s first examine why we feel the urge to do something all the freaking time…

“IF YOU AREN’T GROWING, YOU’RE DYING”

If you’re reading this, you had at least some experience with the self-help industry. Yep, the gurus telling us to chant “I’m happy” as soon as we manage to drag our sorry asses out of bed. I’m doing a slight injustice to the whole thing, as some of the stuff I learned there actually helped me better my own life, however, there are many potholes preying on those daring to take a ride on the becoming-your-best-self highway. One of them is the notion of optimizing anything and everything in your life.

The cocaine-like enthusiastic businessman telling you to not be a fucking pussy and go hustle 24/7. A motivational speaker yelling at you to never waste a second of your time. Ough, and the good-old: “If you aren’t growing, you’re dying.”

This last one summarizes all the different interpretations and ways of saying that you either keep moving or you die. If you don’t get better, not every day, but every second, you are falling behind. In a world that cherishes bigger, better, and sexier, this feels undeniably real. In this world exceptionalism is not an option, it’s the norm.

It’s good for the economy. It drives progress. We build bigger, better, stronger and faster machines. We admire the most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most powerful and try to buy ourselves a seat at their table. Yet, this good-for-economy lifestyle fucks us up individually. And if you think about it, how long until the whole world is fucked up? (Or are we too late for that?)

The constant pursuit for more doesn’t equal happiness. It equals paranoia. The paranoia of not working hard enough, not being good enough, not being able to keep up with all the hustlers you see on Instagram with their Rolexes, Tom Ford suits, and hot chicks. The paranoia that makes you do more and more and makes you feel worse and worse. But why is that the case? Let’s dig even deeper…

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

What’s the bigger picture?

You and me trying to optimize every single part of our lives, trying to hustle for hours on end, to have more money, to buy more things, … it all boils down to one simple, yet painfully obvious conviction buried deep down our psyche:
“I am not enough, therefore I need to do something to become enough or at least feel like it.”

This is buried so deep inside our mind that we often fail to acknowledge it’s there in the first place. The times we come across it, it feels easier to suppress it than to deal with this biggest insecurity of us all… We need to do something, have something to be enough.

(How our insecurities develop and become a part of ourselves is a whole another beast and goes beyond the scope of this article and will probably be discussed on its own at some point. Here, I want to focus on the consequences of the aforementioned insecurity.)

The underlying assumption of us not being enough creates a belief that we need to add something to ourselves to perfect the person we are, to make it worthy of love, peace, happiness etc. Couple that with the whole Propaganda machine built on instilling the notion of buying our worthiness and you get a culture scrambling for happiness on the economic hamster wheel rigged against it. You get Jenny to believe she needs a perfect body and hundreds of likes on Instagram to be accepted. You get Brandon to believe he needs to be a millionaire to be even considered successful. You get hordes of people waiting outside the Apple store for days to get the newest gizmo and feel complete (for a fleeting couple of moments).

You get a bunch of people believing they must “kill” themselves every day to feel complete or “kill” themselves to earn enough money to buy that feeling.

The underlying cause of consumerism from this point of view could as well be our subconscious assumption of our inferiority that results in our compulsive pursuit of external things: money, things, sex. We want to believe the underlying problem of not being enough would somehow resolve itself this way.

What fucks us up (for a lack of a better term) is a simple fact: inner problems cannot be solved by an acquisition of external things and pleasures. You can convince yourself that it helps for a while, but the underlying “I’m a piece of shit” belief doesn’t just go away.

Even more so, the constant need to acquire more and more reinforces our insecurities and feelings of inferiority. The more you do something to feel better, the more you affirm you are not good enough in the first place and consequentially you begin to over-compensate even more. It creates a vicious downward spiral almost impossible to get out of.

Think back at the time where you had this one goal that you thought would change everything for you: getting through your whole reading list to feel smart enough, making a certain amount of money to feel you’ve made it, finally having sex with that stunningly hot girl you’ve been pursuing for months just to prove to your friends (and yourself) you are awesome …

Now, think about the discrepancy between how you thought achieving the goal will change your self-image and what actually happened. When you make it happen, yes, it feels amazing. This euphoric moment can last for days, hours or just a couple of seconds. Sooner or later, you are back at your default state of being. Like nothing happened. You instinctively look for the next high, because that one will do it for you — for real. The next one will change everything.
And then it doesn’t.

The truth is it never really does. It’s like a drug that doesn’t give back. Sooner or later the high wears off leaving you with nothing but the good-old you — the good-old piece of shit. yourself.

BREAKING THE WHEEL

Since the addictive cycle of running away from ourselves and chasing fulfillment in the external world is being conditioned in ourselves every day of our lives, the solution cannot be an overnight one. To be frank with you, I don’t have the ultimate solution either. I am not there yet. However, sometimes you don’t have to see the whole road in front of you in order to make progress — a couple of feet in front of you is all you need to keep moving forward. I may not have the ultimate solution, but I can share with you how I got started, my “couple of feet before me” if you will…

Chopping down a 30-year-old oak tree cannot be done with one ax. Annihilating the limiting assumption of our own inferiority, reinforced from the moment you started breathing, cannot be achieved with a one big, grandiose action. Here’s where a (surprisingly) beneficial cheesy saying comes in: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Try this: For the next minute (yes, right now is a perfect time), just be with yourself. Don’t look at your phone, turn down the music, close your eyes. There’s no need for any Himalayan monk’s breathing technique. Just tune into your body. Focus on how it feels. What sensations are passing through it? Scan it down. Don’t judge. Accept what you feel. Embrace your existence. Try it now.

Alright, I get it… Most of you probably didn’t stop and try it — you are in a rush to sprint through this article, try to get a basic gist of what I am trying to say (or not even that) and get on with your day. Yet, this urge to move on is a clear-cut example of what I’m trying to prove here — you are running. Who are you running from?

For those of you who tried it, how did it feel?

For me, a couple of thoughts popped into my head the first time I did it. First, I never realized how fucking long 60 seconds can feel if you don’t do anything. It seems infinite but in a good way. Second, I felt weird. Why? Because I don’t remember doing or feeling this way… ever. We are not used to being with ourselves, even though we are ourselves 24 hours a day. How paradoxical is that?

I call this 60-second process a Tune In. It’s what I do at random times during my day. It helps me get focused, calm, grounded and (most of all) at ease. It eradicates the compulsive need to run away from your inner world and go numb yourself in the outer one. It gets you out of your head. It gets you feeling alive. (Damn, that sounded kinda woo-woo — It’s not. Try it.)

You don’t have to meditate for 2 hours unless that’s your undying wish — it sure as hell isn’t mine. I find doing a couple of Tune Ins during the course of my day is a quick and simple way to achieve the benefits mentioned earlier. The best part: you can do them practically anywhere, i.e. when you are waiting in line at your grocery store, at the gym in between sets, while waiting for the traffic light to turn green… The possibilities are endless. As a side benefit, this sporadic Tune Ins helps you make this “enough” feeling part of your life as you weave them in seamlessly with your regular activities.

When these regular Tune Ins get comfortable and you start to really enjoy them, you can try adding 10–20 minutes of just doing nothing to your day — like some people do with meditation. Try out what works for you. I prefer this being-with-myself time in the evening, simply lying in bed. (Not in that way, pervert.)

WHAT AWAITS ON THE HORIZON

There is sand all around him. He’s been wandering this godforsaken place for days now. Starved. Dehydrated. Exhausted in body and spirit. Lost. The sky above is bathing in total darkness. No stars. Dead. He knows this, yet a strange feeling emerges in his gut urging him to look up once more. It’s instinct, not faith, that makes his eyes look up. And then he sees it…

One lonely star in the middle of pitch black sky. The star that changes everything. Still at the same place, yet he’s not lost anymore. There is hope on the horizon. There’s the North star showing him the way.

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Stopping the rat race of your normal day — always trying to do more and be at 3 places at the same time — will be scary and uncomfortable at first. That’s okay. Everything you are not used to feels like that. However, after doing it a couple of times another feeling will begin to set in… hope. “I can beat compulsion. I don’t have to run anymore. Nothing scary will happen.”

Silently, but surely another thought comes knocking on your mind’s door… a strange thought: “Shit. Maybe, just maybe, I’m enough.”

The thought and feeling that will, if you make them your guideline, lead you to a better, happier life.

Your North Star.

A traveler’s star is always the same size, always in the sky — yours can expand and become bigger, brighter. The more you learn how to be with yourself, how to tune into your sensations and just be, the more “YOU” you feel. “Your North Star is growing.” You become more present, relaxed and comfortable at everything you do in your life. “It grows brighter.” Suddenly, everything you do is not an escape anymore. You are not afraid. You are enough. You are not running. You are enough.

For the first time in your life, you are free.![]