Breaking Away

posted on 4 Aug 2024

I’ve been reading “Mastery” by Robert Greene recently and it has spawned a host of new ideas in my head. One of the prevailing themes in this book is finding your true calling or genuine interest in a topic, which Greene calls your “Life’s Task.” Most people have a subject or activity that interested them greatly in childhood, or perhaps a collection of things that make them unique or more inclined toward certain perceptions and modes of thinking that set them apart from the average. On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who possess remarkable disadvantages and as a result of having to work around their deficiencies, end up finding their life’s task and coming out of the other side as deeply fulfilled and right where they were destined to be.

Childhood is a time of unfiltered states of being because societal, familiar, and practical expectations have not yet suppresively gripped the psyche of the person, burying their innate propensities deep inside. While some may be lucky enough to not face the externalized pressure of their environment and end up finding out what they love quite early, the reality is much different for the rest of the unfortunate. Their deepest desires are killed off and bottled up, surfacing perhaps only in the subconscious or unconscious mind. This manifests as eventually “hitting a wall” and resorting to things to numb the pain of living a life you were not supposed to live. Perhaps it’s drugs, perhaps its alcohol, perhaps its an entirely different distraction to escape and numb the pain of your monotonous life that you try to cope with so desperately in an attempt to maintain financial security or look traditionally successful in the eyes of your peers, your parents, and society at large.

There are things I’ve always been interested in, things that I’ve always wanted to do. Yet instead of exploring these things, I aggressively tried to kill them off during my teenage years and early 20s. Instead of nurturing my innate inclinations and talents, I left college with a degree that I hardly gave a shit about because it promised a lucrative, high paying career and looked impressive in the eyes of society and of my parents.

For so long, I’ve tried coping with the idea that “work isn’t supposed to be fun or give you meaning, it’s only a means to make money to support your life outside of work.” Yet, work comprises the majority of our time on Earth and one does not have a ton of energy when all is said and done to actually enjoy the few hours of life that remain later in the day on any given day. Where has this led me? Stimulant medication abuse. Drinking. Binging on the internet, binging on food, general self destruction. Because no matter how hard I try, I keep hitting a wall while expecting things to change. The idea of stability in general, of repeating the same monotonous routine, is slowly incinerating my insides. For once, I’m truly becoming someone who does not give a shit whatsoever. I’ve gone far past being “indifferent” to the field I’m in; I’m actually coming to oppose the field that I’m in. I hate it. Learning some new language or framework, being assigned to a new project - all of these things cause an intense pit in my stomach. Ultimately, I feel like I’m both wasting my time and falling behind. Since I have no interest in the topics involved in my career, I have no motivation to continue to improve. Eventually, this is going to catch up to me. I feel like my learning in the domain has halte entirely. I do anything else that I can besides my work when at work and suffer the consequences later when I’ve not made any progress.

All of this behavior has given me a new problem and one that is covered extensively in Greene’s book so far: developing the focus, discipline, and the ability to concentrate and dig deeply on some subject to extract the best ideas and produce the best work from within yourself. Digging deep for hours and then letting your unconscious mind work things out for yourself is extremely powerful.

The problem is that, through my distraction and self-numbing, I’ve severely reduced my ability to burrow deeply into some topic. I feel as if I have a sort of anxiety about it now, multitudes of cognitive dissonance inside of my brain when I try to focus on something. It’s a combination of factors, one of them being that I’ve essentially destroyed my faculties by not exercising them and instead resorting to piddling around, surfing the internet with occasional binges, and generally just fucking off.

So, instead of living a quality life of enjoying things deeply or being able to enter a flowstate for extended periods of time to study a subject of interest or bring a creative project or idea to fruition, I’m in a state of stasis where I make no progress in any facet of my life. I do not improve in my career; I do not enjoy my time outside of work. Not only do I have several interests that I’d like to pursue in more depth that I’m inhibited from doing, not only do I have a creative project that brings me immense amounts of happiness and which I’ve put on hold for a long time, but I seem to be unable to even enjoy any of the good books or music or video games that I’ve collected. Because truly, it’s gotten to the point where it’s difficult for me to even focus on a video game. I suppose that’s to be expected considering I have a million different thoughts floating through my mind pertaining to my discontent for the life I’m now living and it manifests somatically.

I can barely sit still sometimes from the chaos inside.

My path from the outside looks quite ideal. I’m independent and make a good amount of money. I’m highly “employable” if I need to be. Indeed I suspect that many people working jobs where they are getting yelled at and paid at minimum wage would kill to have my position. I often see this as a coping mechanism that people try to force upon me - “Hey, at least you’re not starving in a third world country right now!”

This is one of the dumbest things that a person can say, because it removes the contextualization of one’s own experience entirely. The fact that people are worse off than me should not be an excuse as to why I stay in a mundane line of work and “suck it up,” or whichever idiotic saying that people choose to adopt and blindly parrot.

If one arrives at retirement and realizes its just now that they can finally enjoy their life and that they settled for stability and essentially wasted their prime years, I can only imagine that this “it can always be worse” is their choice of copium that they can now spread around to others. In their delusion, this “accepting things as they are” is a sign that they are “mature/well-reasoned and wise” individuals. I would secretly be resentful if I was them too. This is not the person that I want to become.

With this aside, I’ll get back to Greene’s imminently important idea of developing discipline and focus. Although in some sense, these things come naturally once you are finally invested in something that catches your interest (the monotnous tasks associated with whatever you choose to pursue become imminently doable in the joy of following your calling), one still has to practice burrowing deeply inside for their most creative and groundbreaking output. And this involves staying with a task for a long amount of time everyday for weeks, months, years on end. It involves shutting everything else out and only looking within to get your most creative, innovative ideas. The last place you want to look if you’re trying to establish a niche is outside. Simply googling “what should I do” is the opposite of what you should do if you want any chance of stumbling into a particular, narrow domain that no one else has yet touched and which you can exploit for your own gain.

I think I have found mine. I still have some more searching to do, but I believe I’m in the nascent stages of recognizing what it is I’ve wanted to do for so long now. At this point, it’s only a matter of continuously reminding myself of the reasons that I’m doing what I want to do. Keeping the vision in mind of me “arriving” where I want to be.

I will not remain trapped.

Reflecting on the state of life these days, it’s no wonder why so many are unfulfilled. Being exposed to far too much information and opinions and ideas than they should (and ones of which are complete garbage quality), they have buried their inner voice and independent thinking quite deeply. Their truest desires are barred from the conscious mind and they show up in subtle forms of self-annihilation, distraction, restlessness, and denial.

I shall stay where I’m at for now while continuously working on an exit strategy. But I know that I will find a way out; I can feel it coming now more than I ever have. It is not too late for me and I know that my efforts will bring about a future that I desire.