Consider Yourself Found
Just another day at the virtual office. A couple of meetings and a lot of typing. You finally finished that report on the preliminary customer research for Happy Wipes entering the UK market after Brexit. You have very little idea why you’ve been wasting your day on this. Do Brits really need ANOTHER brand of silky-soft toilet paper? You guess they have plenty of choice as it is, and no amount of rolls will erase the shit going on there anyway.
(Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all political on you.)
Either way, as you question the meaning of your work, life, and everything, you find your motivation sink deeper and deeper. You go through the daily motions, hoping your boss will finally acknowledge you are doing a great job. That’s what you’ve learned in school, anyway — meet the expectations, get your well-deserved A. You are such a good kid.
But there is no A for life and the more you realize this the more that voice in the back of your head is nagging you: why the hell am I spending my precious time carving reports that nobody will read anyway? Not because you’re so bloody passionate about your brand of toilet paper’s odds of survival, that’s for sure. Why then?
Slowly it dawns on you: because you thought you had to. And now you’re realizing that you really, really don’t. That you’ve been wasting your life.
So you take a sabbatical. Travel to Thailand and Bali, because that’s where all the cool kids are (let me translate that for you: cool = in search of themselves; kids = adults). You want to be one of them. You also want yoga retreats and uncovering the *real* you. Your Tinder profile and introduction into the spiritual travelers’ Facebook Group proudly claim ‘In search of my true self’.
Then, this morning, sipping your green beast smoothie, you quickly browse Medium articles — so much better than Instagram, though admittedly you indulge in that as well, if only to share a happy selfie of you drinking said smoothie — and you stumble onto this one. “What is that? Does this girl claim I’m already found? Does she have some profound wisdom to share? Will she be my next guru?” Dear God, I hope not. But I’ve been that soul-searching girl. The full starter pack: launching my own business, a ticket to Thailand, morning chai lattes, disappointment in life to date, and the latest and greatest books on finding my purpose. So now, with all the wisdom of a woman addicted to personal growth, I want to share with you how I found myself:
I stopped looking.
Stop Messing Around
This search for oneself is some trippy inception-bullshit really. When you claim to search for yourself, that implies that the you who’s searching is not really you. That there is actually some other you, a you that is somewhere else at this moment — either in South East Asia or in the fifth dimension. A you-2.0. One that is zen and present in the moment, doing things that are worthwhile.
Now reread that. What you’re doing is you’re trying to find the you who’s present in the moment, by avoiding the present moment and embarking on this odd Odyssey of finding the person you are not.
That’s pretty much the opposite of happiness. There is nothing screaming joy about abandoning the you who is, and wishing to be the you who clearly doesn’t exist (yet) instead.
I can’t sugarcoat it and make it more palatable: your entire search of the real you is nothing more than a simple distraction from the actual real you. There is no you that’s more real than the you who is.
Now I’m not saying you have to stay in the job you hate, with the guy (or girl) you hate, in a city you hate. But leaving them behind is not where being happy starts. And it also doesn’t start with hour-long meditation or days at the spa. By all means, do all these things. But the real and simple shortcut to finding yourself is this: opening your eyes and seeing that you are already here.
