simple tool to find yourself and your purpose again.
Many times in my life i’ve felt completely lost and hopeless and many times i’ve found my way back.
Fundamentally being lost means you’re not exactly sure how to spend your time. Whether you’re not sure what your future looks like or you’re not sure what you’re doing day to day. Finding your way back will take an approach that will attack from multiple angles.
Now. If you’re completely depressed and just can’t see the meaning of life at all – it’ll take a little longer to truly start seeing that life does have meaning, you just have to get rid of whatever fog or negative loop you’ve unfortunately found yourself in.
A big part of this mental fog – while it sounds like what everyone says. It’s coming from being overly stimulated by either your phone, computer, sex, drugs, gaming or whatever escape you chose to use to numb the pain of the meaninglessness of your current life. If you’re always being stimulated and busy with life’s tasks and you never take a moment to ask yourself “What am i doing with my life? How do i want to live my life? Am i truly happy with how things are?” you’ll never get the self awareness and mental engine running to start answering these deep life questions. And yes, passively watching videos on how to find your life’s purpose also counts as distraction. Its better than nothing but it wont magically give you the answer to your questions. The way i’ve happened to come across what i believe is my life’s purpose is a combination of reaching an all time low mixed in with exercising to have the best neurochemical balance in my brain mixed in with a decent enough diet mixed in with journalling. So if your life is “good enough” you’ll most likely not be pushed to elict any real meaningful change. If your life is indeed not fulfilling and you realize that but your brain chemicals are making you believe there’s no point in even trying because your diet and exercise are poor you again won’t elicit any real change. Now if you’re exercising and are truly fed up with your circumstances but you’re not journalling or making any real plan you’ll just be a motivated lost person, less lost for sure cause you know change is needed and you now have the mental and physical energy to do something about it but without a real plan or vision for where you want to end up things will just be that much harder for no good reason.
So. let’s say you’re working a job you dont particularly like and you everyday come home and just game or spend your time mindlessly scrolling. What’s the number one thing that would help? Well if you ask me, i’d try this way – go on long walks with no distractions and just think outloud.
This will be uncomfortable in the beginning if you’re used to always having something in your ear either a podcast, youtube video or music. But slowly you will get used to the discomfort and build a tolerance to not being stimulated. You’ll find many topics popping up or maybe in the beginning nothing happens but if you just stick with this habit you’ll find two things. 1) you’re getting some small exercise in which is good for your brain and brain fog. 2) you’ll naturally ponder what how you want your life to go espescially if you purposely navigate your mind towards that topic.
Okay nazem i did that now i have all these thoughts, what do i do?
Perfect. Now you start actually free journalling these thoughts down either on paper (slower and gives you time to think more) or on your computer (faster and better for mind dumping). You’ll notice you’ll encounter a pesky little thing called resistance in the beginning “oh what do i even write about?” “uh im not sure what if someone sees this stuff?” ignore all that and just word vomit what you’re thinking and try and envision what a good future for yourself could look like. Just repeat this process over and over everyday and you’ll notice a pattern and you’ll get closer to things that sound exciting. Do you want to be a web designer? An artist? Or do you wanna code games, travel to japan, or start knitting? Whatever idea excites you just explore how you could realistically get closer to doing that thing. Maybe your job actually sucks and you work manual labor and would like a desk job for a change. Explore what it would realistically take to make those changes.
But here’s the tricky part, we humans are forgetting machines, you might think “ah! i’ve found what my goal and purpose is! i’m never journalling again and i’ll forever be motivated” nope. thats unfortunately not how it works. you need to constantly remember why you started and check in with yourself to see if your purpose is morphing and changing into something different. Everyday you’re experiencing new things and what excited you last year might not excite you now or it still does but in a more nuanced way. Check in with yourself by journalling daily (i have to admit im not yet doing this daily but i really should) and reorienting yourself to what feels like your life’s purpose.
Do these things and you should be one step closer to knowing what you truly wanna do with your life.