Author: admin

One of the worst things you can do is feel awful for the incredible luck that you’ve experienced. The constant comparison of your situation to awful things leaves you stuck. You’re tethered to another realm of being that doesn’t exist. Some other plane where things are abysmal, even though in reality they are nothing of the sort.

Quite often these baseline horrors happen after traumatic events. A bankruptcy or a death. Something you’ll do anything in your power never to experience so long as you live. Initially, that fuel, that aversion, is a healthy additive to whatever motivation oyou may have. Slowly, though, the additive coagulates and starts making you work harder than you need to. There is simply no way you will experience that thing again based on your trajectory and yet you run faster and faster away from it. You desecrate the initial action from aversion. At some point, you don’t know what your even running from or running towards. That is the abyss. That is when you find yourself totally un-tethered to your actual circumstances and in an endless race against and towards oblivion.

In order to know what you want you must create the silence required for those thoughts to come. And, in order to do that, you must burn the boats. You must agree and accept that the worst of the worst can happen and you must nod at that reality and walk away from it. You do not have to apologize for the possibility of tragedy whilst you enjoy the good times. You must simply enjoy the good times and look to make things better.

For decades now, I’ve read every bit of philosophy and wisdom I’ve gotten my hands on. Russell to Hume to Seneca to Aristotle to Aurelius to Spinoza to Thoreau to everyone in between. Searching. Always searching. Then it came to me recently that I had no idea what it was that I was actually searching for. Was it a roadmap on how to live? The Talmud seems to be silent on the type of car I should lease. Was it a pursuit of happiness? How would I even know once I found it, and what if happiness was mostly genetically predisposed to someone. Was it thriving in business? Most philosophers (save, Seneca) were poor and didn’t touch on that. No, it wasn’t any of that-seemingly I was doing this simply to distract.

The one thing I continue to be unable to face is myself in silence. In other words, I cannot seem to answer what it is that I want. What it is that I’m searching for. I’m digging holes across the field but, even after all of these years, I’ve no idea what answers I’m even looking for.

A thought came to me the other day: Just drop all of it. Drop the searching. Drop the conflicting sage advice one receives in searching for wisdom. Allow the silence to take shape, and don’t expect anything beyond that. Stop moving around. See what comes up.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ghosts. When I was a kid, my parents were often at work, and I was alone in the apartment. Their bedroom was off to the left side through a hallway, and when it was dark outside, and the lights were on in that room, it felt as if something was there. Maybe it was just the fear of a young kid alone, or maybe it was more. That memory-the blackness of a room-has stayed with me to this day. I often wonder about whether or not energy remains in a place. Whether we leave some sort of trail behind; some electric pattern of being. I often think that this question gets lost in the religion debate. It seems almost irrelevant to discuss whether or not there is a “higher” power, when all you want to know is if memories have some way of lingering in the air.

For my money, Ernest Becker’s book: “The Denial of Death” is a total encapsulation of man’s often fruitless search for meaning or purpose as a way to defeat death. And how do you try our best to escape death? Through control. Always beyond our grasp, control is what we strive for in everything we do.

Ram Dass has this amusing recording from 1999 where he discusses how things seem to be moving too quickly. Political, social, environmental upheaval made people exceptionally nervous and that nervousness-the lack of control-breeds fear. Fast forward to 2025 and it feels like that on steroids. How absurdly predictable we are as a species. We exercise harder, take more supplements, work more, consume infinitely more, worry more. Everything more. And we do all of this-all of it-in some outdated form of trying to control the uncontrollable. Always on the wheel, always spinning, never understanding what it is we are spinning for.

Meditation has been culturally prescribed as an elixir to this madness. As a way to escape these thoughts or, rather, control them. But just like any medication, when it’s not used for its intended purpose, it does not cure the ill. One cannot meditate if one cannot sit still, and 95% of the difficulty in meditating is the sitting still. One (I) cannot sit still, because of the constant fear that something must be taken care of. That this is not productive. That this will not help. That the you in you is not a meditator. That you have so much to do. That you can’t find the time. In reality, the quiet is the terror. The quiet tells you that all around you, life moves on without you. That your work, your goals, your striving, your concerns, your worries, your end games, your everything is meaningless. It is meaningless because everything is meaningless. Everything is meaningless because everything is impermanent. But this capital T truth is terrifying and so we spin instead. We contort and plan and scheme and cry and work and book trips and do anything you can to avoid staring at the abyss, even though we know it’s right in front of us.

The terror lives in ourselves. It needs nothing to survive. In fact it feeds off of our strict schedule of denying it exists. But what if we befriend it? That’s not a hypothetical question either. What if we actually befriend the terror. That would mean we shatter our ego in the process. It would mean that certainly our goals are not really ours. That our identity has been formed not through our own conscious attempts at becoming this thing, but rather as the reflections of everyone around us. It would mean we’d have to put down the hopes and dreams and struggles and complaints as not our own. And then we are left with what? With a perplexing lack of self and no closer to the meaning we are quite literally dying for. And while this is unsatisfying, it is likely the only real truth there is. We may find that when we crack our ego and ourselves, we may find love there, deeply hidden, ready to emerge. We may find that all we wish to do is give and receive love. That we want help and want to provide help and we want nothing other than to live. And may that be enough.

The problem with success is that it’s really tough to wean off of. You follow this linear pattern of up, up, up, and you don’t quite understand when you’ve actually made “it.” Thousands of years ago, you made it when you found a mate, or hunted food or gathered enough materials for a shelter. Now, not much is tactile. You no longer feel success, or see it in front of you. What’s worse, you often have to look to the left and right to see what your neighbors level of success is and compare it to yours.

The solution to this cannot simply be to step back and realize that success is amorphous anymore than telling a cigarette smoker that he should fight the urge to smoke by thinking about how silly all of it is. It’s deep in you, it’s got control, and it needs slaying.

What is your life if you’re not pointing to some far away goal? In what universe are you simply permitted to just “be”, rather than attain something. What if you can’t sit still? What if fear pervades any attempt to stop? How do you measure your worth? How do others measure your worth? What is life worth? What is your life worth? What does a good life look like? What if you just spend it goofing off? What if everything you know about yourself begins to implode because you can’t distract yourself? How does silence feel for you? What if there’s nothing to take care of right now? What if there is too much time and not enough time at the same time? What if this is all there is? What if these questions have no answers? Who do you become then? How do you compare yourself to anything? When if the lack of effort is the point? What if it all implodes?

Success, in one way or another, is a wonderful substitute for siting quietly and pondering those most uncomfortable questions we all are scared to us. It’s our cigarette that we’re all dying for, even though we know it’s probably not good for us and takes us away from the thing we really want.

Fear dictates most of the waking day. Fear of failure. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of not being enough or of being too much. Fear of meaninglessness. Fear or financial ruin or identity loss or physical fear or any thousands of other types of fear. We are absolute aliens to ourselves. We evolved in a world of predators and instinct. At some point, hundreds of thousands of years after our arrival, we’re asked to put that aside and find meaning in all of this. We’re asked to abandon that very thing which saved us. Our birthright. Our ancestral gift. We are placed in an ever changing world and set free. Animals on parade. And through this, we try our very best to mask fear or use fear as fuel. But fear is not a house cat you can toy with. It’s a black vapor that engulfs you. Your ideas of confronting it are not novel, nor will they likely be effective.

Fear is what paralyzes most people. Not the actual thing, but the idea of fear. The uncontrollable world around them. The failure to yield to what they wish the world to become. I have yet to figure out how to escape this loop. It goes on endlessly, whether I am conscious of it or not.

If you’ve spent decades trying to understand what in the world you believe, and still can’t quite pin it down, you’re in luck. The world’s institutions are crumbling, one after the other. For over 15000 years, the Church gave people a set of beliefs, requirements, and rules to build their life around. One’s heroic odyssey was part of the whole. Before that, the Romans, and before that the Greeks, and before that the Assyrians, and before that, who knows? Each society had it’s own set of rules. You did not need to strive very much beyond what your station in life as. We now spin, endlessly spin, searching for some capital T truth to tell us, in plain terms, on our timeline, what we should be doing with our lives. What level of morality we should accept as satisfactory. We are undeniably obsessed-I am undeniably obsessed-with what it means to be a good person, and how to hit that level in the game. The Tao tells us to allow; that if we strive we are ruining the whole thing. Our culture says we must strive. What would our ancestors think of us? Can our ancestors think of us? Does time move in a linear fashion? If the Theory of Relativity is correct, it does not. Time always is and always will be. We’re essentially playing out our parts. But, if that’s so, why would I chose a crappy place to eat lunch? Surely that wasn’t somehow predestined in the universe. If you often feel as if you’re plunging down a river, trying your best to hold on to any piece of detritus you can find, just so you have a decent grasp on something solid, welcome to the club.

The problem-the rather big problem- is the more we find ourselves in this state, the less we take action on the things in the world that call to us. We must wake up in our own, unsatisfactory way, and simply do the work, and allow the theoretical to live where it always has and it always will. That is the only certainty there is.

If we were put here but an all knowing being, then there is something to strive for. Some reason. Some meaning behind it all. If we simply arose out of millions of years of evolution, only to be wiped out at some point down the road, then it is meaningless. Small imprints of love are the only things on the path of life that give any of it much sense. So much of the day to day is spent wrestling with this in the background. So much of attaining something is, in reality, a subconscious quest to try and protect ourselves against a looming black void.

People often fail to perceive the rationale behind the choices they make. There is, in the recent lexicon, an idea of a hedonic treadmill. You buy things to make yourself feel better, but then you step feeling better and you have to buy something else. The inverse of this-minimalism-says that to truly feel content, you must get rid of many of your possessions. Both are an attempt to exhale, if only for a moment, all of the breath you’re holding in, staring at that void of yours. In other words, they are distractions. We want to be distracted. We yearn to be distracted. Anything not to stare at mortality. Any voice, any virtue, anything new, any return to old, any step is an attempt to look away from what is in front of us. The all consuming terror of it all.

There is no reason you cannot die right now. Nothing provides you some exquisite safeguard against the instantaneous nature of mortality. And yet, each day of your life, you gamble again. A gamble that you will survive to see tomorrow. And making that gamble gives you license to do all the comparatively meaningless things you’ll do all day. And, every morning, the moment you wake, this gamble is made again and again and again, until, one day, you lose the gamble you made.

This is achingly clear to anyone who has ever experienced profound loss in their lives. You become intimately clear with the finality of it all. The sheer, illogical nature of life. The predicament you face is what to do with this knowledge. What windmills shall you charge now? What do you use your life force for, exactly. How do you make meaning in life? How do you do it every day? Kindness, generosity, love, sure. But those appear as tactics rather than strategy. What, exactly are you to do with this one life?

In a few weeks, I will be 43 years old. Those words are difficult to comprehend. I have no idea how that happened. 43 seems a life lived. Not to suggest the precipice of death “life lived”, but enough to gleam some answers. I have more questions than answers, and the questions seem to multiply and the answers grow distant.

From my 20’s to my late 30’s, I sat on a rocket ship and pointed north career wise. More. More files. More clients. More money. More accolades. Next mountain. I didn’t ask where the ship was going, but I got on, frying my cortisol levels in the process. Equating money (not finance money) with stability. With control. With “optionality.” That no longer works.

I wake up every morning and think “what is being asked of me?” I am a father perplexed that he is a father. I am a husband perplexed that he is a husband. I have many trappings I thought I should have. Every morning, I think: “There is something missing here.” Some level of soulfulness or meaning or reason or goal or point. There must be others out there. Legions of middle aged men that watch the sunrise, horrified of a looming death in the distance or close by, unsure what to do today, let alone 10 years from now. Do I no longer have mountains to scale? Am I done? The best I can do is distract myself until the melancholy dissipates. I have absolutely no answers at 43.