What drives me?
We all (should) get to a point where we try to define the driving forces in this life. What moves us forward? Unfortunately, most of us don’t get to that point until something really bad happens. Until we feel cornered with nowhere else to go. I’ve been there a few times now, but this is the first time that I realized that this might be something I need to focus on.
Because lately it’s been really difficult to find a reason to move forward.
Look around and you’ll start to see what drives the people around you. Money and a successful career are popular, and that’s what I, and many others, were told growing up. You need to make decisions based on what’s going to make you “good money” and buy a nice house and start a family and and and…
Then we start to think to ourselves, “Is that all there is?” Sure fucking seems like it sometimes.
Look a little closer and you’ll find some people that value experiences more than just about anything else. On one end you’ll have people that do everything they can to travel, to see new places. On the other end I’d place self-proclaimed “adrenaline junkies” who want to feel those intense experiences at the very edge of human experience. That spectrum is an interesting one, and some of those traditional forces will be a supplemental driver to achieve that. I think there’s a lot of respect to be given to folks on that spectrum.
I’ve met a few people who just want peace. They want a life that feels intentional and whole in a way that is hard to describe. It’s a very “human” decision to make, to live a life with no real guidelines other than every moment needs to be in the pursuit of achieving something instinctually human. This feels like a very small number of people, but I think that’s because it takes a lot of self awareness and willpower to live that way.
What frustrates me the most is the lack of clear answers here. It’s all a “feeling” you get when you know something is right. No one is out there telling us what that feeling feels like, so how can we know what the right “thing” is?
I envy people who know these things; who’ve felt them and can understand that clarity. Maybe I’ve already had that, and maybe I just failed to recognize it.
We’re all on these hyper specific journeys, where every moment of every day can have no meaning at all or all the meaning in the world. As individuals we are the only ones who can decide what to give meaning to, and that needs to happen in the vacuum of our soul but it also needs to, in some fashion, take into account all the things around us.
In a way, I envy people who don’t have this problem. The people who living just comes naturally. Where drive and motivation are second nature because of some internal will to just move in a predetermined series of motions that, more often than not, totally align with their sense of self.
Each day it gets clearer that humanity is this beautiful curse that gives us everything we need to be whole yet everything that is capable of breaking us into a million pieces. The decision to pick those pieces up and rearrange them in a fulfilling way is arguably the most difficult thing we have to do, and sometimes we have to do it every single day.
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