12/26/2025
Most people spend their entire lives looking for meaning in the wrong places. They chase careers they don’t care about. They invest in relationships that drain them. They optimize their lives for outcomes that don’t actually matter. And somewhere in all of that grinding, they lose touch with the one thing that makes them feel alive.
You know the feeling I’m talking about. It’s that moment when you’re doing something and time disappears. When you’re so fully present that the anxiety in your chest quiets down. When you’re not proving anything, you’re just being exactly who you are, without a second thought.
For some people, it’s creating: writing, painting, building, making something from nothing. For others, it’s moving: running, dancing, hiking, letting their body speak what their mind can’t. For some, it’s being in nature. For others, it’s a deep conversation with someone they trust. It might be cooking, reading, gardening, playing an instrument, or sitting in silence.
The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that you find it. And once you do, you protect it like your life depends on it. Because it does.
Most people find that thing, feel that aliveness, and then they apologize for it. They squeeze it into the margins of their “real life.” They tell themselves it’s selfish or impractical or not important enough. So they abandon it. They go back to the grind. And slowly, they get so numb they forget what it feels like to feel alive altogether.
Don’t do that.
Whatever pulls you into the present moment, whatever makes you feel like your most authentic self, is not a waste of time. It’s your nervous system telling you what you actually need.
Find it. Make space for it. Not as a reward for being productive, but as something you deserve. Something you return to again and again because it reminds you who you actually are when you’re not trying to be anything else.
The world will always ask you to be someone else. But there’s one special thing that asks you to be yourself.
Find it. Cherish it. That’s everything.