You were just always taught to look away from it.
Start scrolling to gaze through the curtain.
Most people never go after what they want because they never let themselves see what it is. They do not let themselves know what it is because knowing is the frightening part. The instant that you admit that you do know what it is you desire, something in you begins pawing at the ground. Then, the life built out of comfort and complacency cannot withstand it. Therefore, we stay asleep on purpose. This feels like safety but it is the quiet destruction of your potential.
I have sat with people who had all of the marks of what people call a successful life - the marriage, the wealth, the prestigious career - and yet they still strongly felt that something was missing.
This is because there are two ways that success can be defined. External success can be attained by means of status, money, approval, and achievement, while all the while one continues to feel a vague discomfort. They have built their lives on the trappings of a good life: the image of it, created and handed down by society in reward for blind obedience, an image assembled out of the ashes of our instincts.
The reckoning comes later, and often at a point when it is too late to do anything about it.
From kindergarten onward, school and work reward the same thing: the ability to set aside what you want in order to get along, sit still, repeat what you are told, and collect the rewards. Intelligence predicts success at school and work because school and work reward the ability to abandon yourself. So often, the more impressive the résumé, the more lost the person behind it. Think about how often people automatically respond to the question of "What do you do?" with their job title. Identity is forgotten, effaced, and destroyed when one performs a role.
PhD in trait emotional intelligence - years spent studying how people learn and forget what they and others truly feel.
A year working in behavioral science until I realized that my work, in truth, was helping to feed people into the mouth of the system.
Working made me miserable because I understood exactly what I was doing to people and to myself. I was not only not serving my purpose but worse I was alienating others from themselves. Penetrate Life is a deliberate inversion: instead of pushing anyone further in, helping them find the way back out toward their own desire.
Am I happy with who I am?
Am I happy with the people around me?
Am I happy with what I'm doing?
Do I have a life - or am I just living?
Do I spend too much time thinking and not enough doing?
Did I try my hardest at ANY of my dreams?
Will I die, never knowing what I could have been or could have done?†
† Transition - Galaxy 2 Galaxy
It goes beyond appetite and mere indulgence. It is aliveness: the life-force that pulls you toward what is truly right for you, the electric current underscoring everything worth doing. To penetrate life is to enter it: to be present inside the days of your life instead of observing them go by, to taste the cornucopia laid out before you, and to be unafraid to express want.
Reject the premise that you are supposed to be building toward a future. The future is an imaginary country. By the time you get there, you are exhausted, your desires are forgotten from being deferred, and you are too self-abandoned to be able to feast. Unfulfilled and submerged desires balloon the belly but constrict the throat until it becomes too narrow to swallow anything.
You have to step into this moment. Make every day a feast day.
Senior media executive. Married. A life that photographed well and felt, from the inside, like someone else's.
Resigned. Divorced. Moved to a European capital to do what she had always wanted to do.
The ones who get what they want - even the things others cannot picture - believe in their capacity to reach it. The ones who don't, refuse it even when it is placed in their hands, because a part of them does not believe that it is theirs to hold.
Belief comes before reality. The belief that you are allowed to reach for something and that you can attain it is what lets your hand move. Change what you believe can be yours, and you change what you are willing to reach toward. And whatever you reach toward is what becomes your life.
You have to decide you're allowed the life you want.
How will you spend your time?