Why You Can’t Enjoy Life
It’s not because you lack the willpower.
I’ve been stuck in a rut.
Writing used to motivate me, but I’ve been asking myself:
What am I doing it for?
Actually, what am I doing anything for?
I felt complacent. Getting lost in distractions and daily obligations. Nothing seemed to fulfill me anymore. I was tired of being tired.
A few weeks later, I looked at my life and realized:
Oh no! Here comes the dark season again…
What The Dark Season Looks Like
It starts like this:
Think about childhood.
For most of us, being a child was truly the time of our lives, and for good reason: 1) Everything is new, and 2) You’re not limited to what’s real or unreal. Achievable or unachievable.
So you laugh with your friends, you play board games, you dive straight into the swimming-pool, you sing at the top of your lungs, you write whatever you feel like writing. Not because you want to achieve something, but merely for the pleasure of doing it.
And then the years go by.
Life becomes less about exploration, and more about:
“What’s the next thing I have to do in order to survive.”
So we make to-do lists and ponder on what we should be doing with ourselves. We set high expectations. We write down our goals.
And as with every goal, there is fear.
Fear creates stress.
In his video Why You Shut Down, Dr. Scott Eilers explains that our brain makes no difference between mental and physical danger (like say, being chased by a grizzly bear).
You might have heard of the term ‘fight or flight’. But there’s another response that is less known, and that is…
The freeze response.
Basically, you don’t fight the grizzly bear.
You don’t even run away from it.
You’re just…stuck.
The worst part is that you know you should be doing something about it, but you don’t. So you stop trying.
Did you notice?
The colors have faded out, but it was a slow and gradual process.
Then we think:
Living used to be colorful, and now it’s like I don’t even want to fight anymore. I don’t want to become ‘successful’. I don’t want to wake up and go to work, day after day. I don’t want to learn and I don’t want to read. I don’t want to explore the world. I don’t even want to entertain myself. What’s this?!
And once you become aware that you’re in the dark season…
It’s too late.
The Shame of Being Colorblind
On the outside, it seems as though you’re lazy.
You don’t try hard enough. You’ve become a zombie, a heavy sleepwalker who cannot appreciate the simple joys of existence.
All you need is a bucket of water, a cold splash on your face so you can finally WAKE UP and realize the urgency of life!
But here’s the thing:
No matter how open your eyes are,
the colors won’t get brighter.
No matter how much color spray you inject,
your irises will stay dark.
The point is, we’re trying so hard to see the world ‘correctly’.
We look at people who are curious, enthusiastic, passionate about living, and we think:
It must be that my way of seeing is bad.
So we try to cure our ‘illness’ by pushing ourselves. Push, push, push. We visualize ourselves at 80 years old, a miserable and pathetic human with nothing to show for. And only then, we take action.
Sometimes it works. And other times it doesn’t.
If you’re in freeze mode, it probably won’t.
Why? Because the ‘illness’ is not you.
It’s not that you lack the willpower. It’s not that you don’t want it badly enough. It’s not that you need more stress to finally get your sense together, because what if…
What if you were already stressed out, and what if that was the reason you’re feeling stuck?
Flash forward, and you’re scrolling on endless social media and eating gigantic amounts of sugary snacks. But one hour ago, you were watching a motivational TED Talk. Why is that?
Maybe it’s not that we’re unwilling to see brighter. Maybe it’s because there was an accumulation of stress that kept building and building and building…making us numb to the colors.
Stress.
What are we going to do about it?
If You Can’t Get Out Of The Rut…Then Stay.
Stay stuck.
You don’t need to push yourself (at least for now).
First, notice that you’re in a cycle of feeling busy and distracted.
Busy has a lot to do with overthinking. Whatever it is we’re pondering on, the what-ifs, the maybes and the should-haves…This is how our stress accumulates.
It’s also why we need a distraction. Because overthinking leads to not thinking at all. This is how we calm our mind.
Eating ice-cream feels great not only because of the ice-cream, but because we can focus on something else instead of the busy thoughts we were having in the first place.
Result: We were never in the dark season. We just see it, we don’t actually live in it. Because we’re always trying to escape.
So what if we stayed?
The technique
Something that’s been helping me is to set a 30-minute timeframe on my agenda. On my to-do list, I wrote:
□ Do Nothing.
Then I sat alone.
Without really expecting it, a question popped out and made me reflect:
What’s going on?
That’s it. The whole point was to reflect on yourself.
Because in the weeks that keep repeating themselves over and over, in the burden of a meaningless reality, it’s easy to forget our own state of mind.
But once we take a break, we can finally utter:
I am here.
I exist.
Something has to change.
If you‘re crying or feeling frustrated, it’s a good sign. It means the old season is dying. Therefore, a new season is going to be born.
Something new.
Finally.
I was craving that.
I was desperately longing for the colors to come, but before, I had to let go of the stressors. Meaning that, I had to disrupt the endless cycle of busyness and distraction…by spending time in solitude.
By asking:
What’s the pain I’m trying to alleviate?
The answer might be different for you.
Perhaps your own suffering is universal, but the way you deal with it is unique. And thanks to that, you have the potential to help yourself and to inspire others along the way.
Maybe that becomes your purpose. It gives you a sense of direction.
You’re going to solve the pain. You’re going to build something out of it. You’re going to make art. You’re going to set an example. You’re going to defy the status quo.
And by doing so, you’re going to open the door to something new.
Note: It’s not easy.
We’re in the stuck cycle, so we’re gonna have to lower our expectations.
The most basic, unpassable actions like getting out of bed, taking a ten minute walk, journaling your future, or reading one single page per day…
They too, deserve the attention.
After all, these tiny habits are going to lead the path to bigger changes like:
Starting a blog / Signing up to the gym / Finding a new career path / Getting a haircut / Traveling the world / Connecting with people / Learning a new language / Moving to another country / Joining a hobby club, etc.
Basically, following your intuition on what feels right, nurturing, challenging, and stimulating.
Not to repair our ‘broken' vision.
But to remember how it was to feel alive.
