08. At any given time, you’re mostly just concerned with how one or (maybe two) people perceive you.
Those people also tend to be the ones who we feel unaccepted by in one way or another. We’re trying to prove something. We’re worried about who will see us in an unflattering way and report it back to them. They’re usually the almost-relationships, slightly disapproving parents, certain someones who we’ve dreamt of impressing for years on end. We’re incapable of having our lives revolve around more than a few people at a time, even if it seems like we’re worried about “people” as a whole. Try to put a face to that worry every time one crops up and you’ll find that the faceless crowd of people is really just one or two who are very, very familiar to you.
09. Nobody is thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you.
So much of our internal conversations with ourselves revolve around quelling fear and panic about how we’re being perceived at any given time. What we seldom realize is that the X factor here is that we’re thinking through other people’s mindsets. We’re just making predictions and assumptions which are heavily if not entirely influenced by our own assumptions of ourselves. To put it shortly: Everybody else is running around worrying about themselves as much as you are worrying about yourself.
10. There’s too much at stake…
…to waste your time on worrying about things that are impermanent, unimportant, and ultimately just distractions from the things that bring you joy.
11. Your feelings of panic are directly related to wanting to change yourself to fit someone else’s idea of who you are.
If you didn’t care to please someone else, if you didn’t feel you needed to be okay with them to be okay, you wouldn’t be worried about it. That sense of panic and concern with how they see you at
all is directly, albeit not entirely, related to how much you feel you need to change or prove yourself otherwise. On a deeper level, it means you’ve externalized your sense of worth and purpose and therefore stability, and so long as it remains that way, it can never be genuine.
12. So if you want to get over these external, surface-level, shallow things, you have to turn your attention to things that matter more.
This is the truest solution and most effective antidote and secret of all secrets to renouncing your sense of whether or not you’re going to be okay with yourself: Make something matter more than how other people see you.
If all you have to care about, if all you think you can offer the world is a nice body or a fancy lifestyle or a lot of money or approval that makes you feel good, you’re not doing everything you can and should be. Of course you’re going to run into anxiety; it’s all meaningless. The moment you know you’re worth more than how you’re seen, the moment you genuinely take stock in the notion that your life is more important than you, is the moment that everybody else’s petty concerns fall to the wayside into the oblivion of unimportance. You become blind to them because you’re only focused on what really does matter: you and whatever the hell you have to genuinely offer to the world.
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10 QUESTIONS
TO ASK YOURSELF
when you don’t know
WHERE YOUR LIFE
SHOULD GO NEXT
01. If you had the life you think you want, what would tomorrow be like? When you imagine the life you want, rather than focus on the elevator speech (“I am this, I do this…”), focus on the daily routine.
If you had the life you think you want, what would you do tomorrow? How different would it be from what you’re doing now?
What from that vision can you actually start doing tomorrow?
02. If social media didn’t exist, what would you do differently? Would you dress differently, feel bad about where you live, care about what your apartment looks like? What choices would you make if you didn’t feel they were being silently policed by the faceless mob of people that lie behind the screens of social media? What would matter? What would you do? Who would you be?
03. If nobody would know what you did with the rest of your life, what would you do? If your life wasn’t the slightest bit performative—if there was nothing you could get from doing something other than just the act of doing it, how would you spend your time? What would you be interested in doing? What would energize you?
04. If you died yesterday, what would you most regret? Forget imagining if you died tomorrow…what if you were already dead?
What would you regret the most? What would you wish you had done differently, saw differently, responded to differently?
05. If you could choose five things that matter most to you, what would they be? Whether you realize it or not, your life will fundamentally be built off of the few things you care about the most. When it’s not,
it will feel out of alignment at best, or off-the-rails at worst.
Fulfillment is living in accordance with what we genuinely value.
06. To what in your life do you feel a subtle, unexplainable “nudge?”
What gives you a feeling of subtle, unexplainable enjoyment? What do you like, even though you don’t understand why you like it?
These are the things to pay attention to. These are the things that are real. Your mind is responding to what you think you like, your emotions are responding to what actually resonates.
07. If you knew nobody would judge you, what would you do with your days? If you would only be praised for your work, for your life, and for your choices—which would you make? What would you do?
08. What are you struggling with the most right now? Interestingly enough, the things that plague you the most deeply are signals toward where you must move next. If your deepest issue is not having a romantic relationship, the next phase of your life will likely need to involve at least trying to develop that. The things that you’re struggling with the most right now can tell you what you really want and toward which direction you should step.
09. What do you already have going for you at this present moment?
The mantra of any major life change should always be: “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” There is no other way to get anywhere.
10. If you had to live tomorrow on repeat for the rest of your life, what would you do? Or, put another way: If you lived today on repeat forever, where would you be? What would you have accomplished?
Would you be thriving at work? Would you have made time for the people you love? Would you have written a book, or played music, or be spending your money in a healthy way? Would you be dressing like yourself, and enjoying the sunrise, and eating in a way that will sustain you over the long-term? Your life exists in its days.
Not in your ideas about those days. Your habits accumulate and begin to default. Imagining that you’ll never grow out of them is the fastest way to a reality check.
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THERE’S NO