101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

who feels like
THEY DON’T KNOW 
what they’re
DOING WITH 
THEIR LIFE
01. Nobody knows what they are “doing with their lives.” Some
people have a better idea of what they’re working toward, but
ultimately, none of us can accurately anticipate or summarize
what our existence is about. Not yet.
02. You decide what your life is defined by. The feeling of being
“lost” isn’t what happens when you go off-path, it’s when you
forfeit control. It’s what happens when you don’t want to
accept the course of events that have unfolded. Being found
again is a matter of owning what happened to you and
continuing to write the story.
03. J.K. Rowling didn’t know she was going to be one of the most
famous writers in the world; she was just writing a story for
her kids. Steve Jobs didn’t know he’d be a pioneer of how
humanity interacts with technology; he was just a guy in his
garage making a computer. Oprah didn’t know she’d become
the poster woman for self-improvement and success; she
was just trying to do a job. You don’t need to know what
you’re doing to still do something extraordinary.
04. There is no way you will be able to predict or plan what will be
happening in 5 years from now.
05. If you can predict and plan for that, dream bigger. Try harder.

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06. Planning your life (or having a cohesive idea of “what you’re
doing”) isn’t necessarily ambition; it’s more just a soothing
notion. Focus instead on what you want to do with each and
every day of your existence. That’s noble. That’s worthwhile.
That will get you somewhere.
07. You owe nothing to your younger self. You are not
responsible for being the person you once thought you’d be.
08. You owe everything to the adult you are today. You owe it to
yourself to ask yourself what you like, what you want, what
calls you, what you need, and what you deserve.
09. Do you know why you don’t have the things you once thought
you wanted? Because you don’t want them anymore. Not
badly enough.
10. It’s likely that you’re between realizing you don’t want what
you once did and giving yourself permission to want what you
want now.
11. Give yourself permission to want what you want now.
12. If you want to change your life, stop thinking about how you
feel lost and start coming up with actions you can take that
move you in a direction—any direction—that’s positive. It’s a
lot harder to think your way into a new way of acting than it is
to act your way into a new way of thinking.
13. Nobody’s life is as good as it looks online.
14. Nobody cares about your social media presence as much as
you do.
15. Social media has uniquely and distinctly made us evermore
concerned with the next big “goal.” If you feel like you don’t
know where your life is going, it’s likely because you don’t
know what you want your next big impressive “goal” to be.
16. You don’t need to accomplish anything to be a worthwhile
human being. Very few people are actually meant to be
extraordinary. That does not mean you cannot know
contentment, love, joy, and all the real wonders of life.

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17. Your life is only ever as good as your perception of it is.
Feeling lost or like you “don’t know what you’re doing” is only
solved by learning to think about things differently. That’s all.
18. Stop asking: “What am I doing with my life?” and start asking:
“What am I doing with today?

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72
THE ART OF 
AWARENESS, 
or how to 
NOT COMPLETELY HATE YOURSELF
All hatred is self-hatred.
And everything is feedback.
I really hope you remember those two tiny sentences every time
your chest is pretzeled up and you feel hopeless and helpless and
as though you’re spiraling into a bottomless bucket of shit.
Everything is a reflection of you because all anything can ever be is
what you take from it and all you can ever take from it, and all you
will ever take from it, is what you are aware enough to perceive. The
expanse of your experience is directly in line with your
consciousness. Nothing is as it is; it is as you are. (That’s a play on
an Anaïs Nin quote.)
Unless you are there to touch and smell and see a flower, it is
nothing but random matter vibrating in a void. Your recognition gives
it its beauty and its presence. You are not in the world; the world is in
you. And though that sounds like another abstract platitude, it is not.
It is reflective of a greater, deeper, truer truth, and in these tiny
moments of recognition, of awareness, we find that what we
immediately perceive is not all there is, and that anything that feels
dense and heavy and “wrong” and “negative” is not a matter of
what’s going on outside but what we’re not healing and changing
inside.
Awareness is the antidote to solving so many seemingly unsolvable
problems. Just the simple knowing that your egocentric mind is
deriving other people’s actions and assuming other people’s
thoughts to torture you is enough to silence it.
The art of learning to be is unassigning “good” and “bad” and “right”
and “wrong” to what you feel and what you see and what other
people show you. After all, even the heaviest, darkest things

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ultimately serve you and open you to a truth you wouldn’t have
considered before had you not been put in the context to see it.
Here, all the things to consider and reflect on and read over again
when you’re feeling particularly terrible. (It was requested numerous
times that I write a follow-up to this, so here you go.)
01. Your actions are more powerful than what anybody can ever
say of you.
The thing about spiraling downward into a fit of helplessness
is that it’s usually accompanied by the feeling that we are
completely out of control of how other people see us. Of
course, this is nothing more than a mechanism of how we see
ourselves, but bear with me, because the point here is that
not one word anybody says is more powerful or true than how
you behave and who you really are. You hold the power here.
You call the shots. How other people want to perceive you is
their problem, which they will have to come to terms with
eventually. How much you want to allow their perceptions to
affect you is yours.
02. What you think others think is more important than what they
actually think. (It shows you to yourself.)
Once you gain the awareness that the whole concept of “what
other people think” is one grand illusion that you’re always at
the short end of, you start to realize that “how other people
see you” shifts as your mindset does. Funny how that works,
huh?
03. Your reactions matter more than other people’s actions do,
and you can choose how you react.
Your opinions/thoughts/feelings/emotions/mental states do
not have to rest on what you find out or simply imagine
people do or don’t say/think or believe about you. The reality
of it is you will never know the entirety of what people are
saying or thinking or believing, and those things are none of
your business. They are carrying on, and always have been,
whether or not you’re made aware of it. The only thing that
changes here is how much you want to change yourself

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based on that hypothetical. They can say what they want. You
can react how you want.
04. In terms of romantic relationships and sex and love and body
types and attraction and all that, the people worth loving and
dating and sleeping with are far more accepting than you’re
giving them credit for.
There was never a true love story in the history of ever that
blossomed because somebody thought somebody else’s abs
were flawless. As long as you’re seeking validation from
somebody who is inherently never going to give it is as long
as you’re withholding yourself from someone who will love
you regardless.
05. You’re supposed to be embarrassed of your younger self—
really.
It’s a mark of progress. (It doesn’t mean you have to stay
embarrassed, though.) It’s good because it means you’re able
to look back and wonder, “How was I ever at that place?”
indicating that you’re no longer there. I hope you never reach
a point in which you look back on your younger self and think,
“Wow, I had it all figured out!” That means you stopped
growing. (And that means you stopped living.)
06. There are overarching problems and then there are the
symptoms of those problems that crop up again and again.
Most people spend their whole lives only addressing the
latter. For example: Losing weight isn’t going to fix your body-
image problem, no matter how much you convince yourself
you’re doing the right thing. You’re doing what will make you
fit into your perception of “correct” as opposed to realizing
that genuine body love doesn’t have your mental stability
hinging on whether or not you miss a class or eat a piece of
pizza. It is a matter of evaluating not how the actions look on
the surface, but where they are rooted. I’m not saying
addressing those roots is easy or finding them fun—I’m
saying you’ll have to do it eventually. You can choose to now,
or you will be forced to later.

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07. There is no fear or worry or concern or paranoia or insecurity
that you could possibly muster up that a million and five other
humans haven’t already felt.
The thing about self-loathing is that it’s isolating in nature. It
makes you the “other” and everybody else the “judgy normal
people.” I know this may be a little disheartening for your ego,
but take it in stride: Generally speaking (and acknowledging
logical exceptions), there is nothing you’ve ever done that
hasn’t been done before—somewhere, somehow, at some
time. The story of the human condition is universal in nature.
It’s the separation and thought that we’re the only ones
experiencing it that intensifies the suffering element of that.
(Interesting how that works, right?)
08. At any given time, you’re mostly just concerned with how one
or (maybe two) people perceive you.
Those people also tend to be the ones who we feel
unaccepted by in one way or another. We’re trying to prove
something. We’re worried about who will see us in an
unflattering way and report it back to them. They’re usually
the almost-relationships, slightly disapproving parents, certain
someones who we’ve dreamt of impressing for years on end.
We’re incapable of having our lives revolve around more than
a few people at a time, even if it seems like we’re worried
about “people” as a whole. Try to put a face to that worry
every time one crops up and you’ll find that the faceless
crowd of people is really just one or two who are very, very
familiar to you.
09. Nobody is thinking about you as much as you are thinking
about you.
So much of our internal conversations with ourselves revolve
around quelling fear and panic about how we’re being
perceived at any given time. What we seldom realize is that
the X factor here is that we’re thinking through other people’s
mindsets. We’re just making predictions and assumptions
which are heavily if not entirely influenced by our own
assumptions of ourselves. To put it shortly: Everybody else is

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running around worrying about themselves as much as you
are worrying about yourself.
10. There’s too much at stake…
…to waste your time on worrying about things that are
impermanent, unimportant, and ultimately just distractions
from the things that bring you joy.
11. Your feelings of panic are directly related to wanting to
change yourself to fit someone else’s idea of who you are.
If you didn’t care to please someone else, if you didn’t feel
you needed to be okay with them to be okay, you wouldn’t be
worried about it. That sense of panic and concern with how
they see you at all is directly, albeit not entirely, related to how
much you feel you need to change or prove yourself
otherwise. On a deeper level, it means you’ve externalized
your sense of worth and purpose and therefore stability, and
so long as it remains that way, it can never be genuine.
12. So if you want to get over these external, surface-level,
shallow things, you have to turn your attention to things that
matter more.
This is the truest solution and most effective antidote and secret of
all secrets to renouncing your sense of whether or not you’re going
to be okay with yourself: Make something matter more than how
other people see you. If all you have to care about, if all you think
you can offer the world is a nice body or a fancy lifestyle or a lot of
money or approval that makes you feel good, you’re not doing
everything you can and should be. Of course you’re going to run into
anxiety; it’s all meaningless. The moment you know you’re worth
more than how you’re seen, the moment you genuinely take stock in
the notion that your life is more important than you, is the moment
that everybody else’s petty concerns fall to the wayside into the
oblivion of unimportance. You become blind to them because you’re
only focused on what really does matter: you and whatever the hell
you have to genuinely offer to the world.

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73
10 QUESTIONS 
TO ASK YOURSELF