What makes life worth living?
What are my values?
What is my purpose?
Lacking an answer to these questions caused me considerable pain in the past, and I’ve realised that most of my issues can be tracked to fucked up values.
“I’m only a worthy human being if I perform well.”
“I’m a failure because I am not top 1% in everything I do.”
“People are there to my advantage, and manipulating them is a valid method to get what I want.”
“I don’t want to care about anyone, including myself.”
At the core, guilt and the need to meet expectations became the main driver of my life while I got slowly pushed to the backseat. I’ve tried to live my life optimising for success in a field I thought I had to be in. The goal of every decision was to get closer to my goals, primarily material success, prestige and ego. Along the way, I learned to suppress the feeling telling me that I don’t enjoy what I’m doing. That allowed me to keep pushing in a direction that was opposite of where my feeling told me to go.
Even still, at the end of last year, I was searching for job opportunities that I knew would make me miserable and hate life. I was clinging to the idea that I would only be worth anything as a human being if I succeeded in the most competitive professional field, the world of finance and capital markets. I needed credit from the people who made it on Wall Street. The fact that I found most of the work meaningless didn’t matter to me, and happiness was no metric I considered in making decisions. While it is one thing to know this, it’s another to act upon. I still struggle with it almost daily.
I know that I need to change my values and belief system to give myself a true chance at happiness. I want to live a full life, and I must define what that means. I’m writing this in the hope that writing down my thoughts will help me commit and understand myself better.
A full life is a life you enjoy, not from a hedonistic perspective but from within. A life you enjoy because you fell in love with the process of continuous growth that one can experience if you’re open to it. I want to learn more, read more, and express myself artistically through music and words. I want to learn to love and to be honest with myself. I want to learn to appreciate the little things in life and see the world in colours instead of shades of grey. I want to learn to make love without experiencing crippling performance anxiety. I want to be a good friend who can put the needs of others in front of my own. Not because of feelings of guilt but because it’s what I want to do. I want to keep exploring; the world, my potential to make it big, and the depths of the human mind.
If I embrace these values, the metrics I apply to evaluate myself change. If I choose to see life as a constant learning experience full of growth opportunities, failure quickly becomes a lesson. By doing that, I hope to transform the (self-) hate into understanding, tolerance, and patience.
While, in theory, this is all beautiful and blah blah blah… the execution is the hard part. I need to live following these values to really internalise them. I need to fight my demons and force myself to show up every day, for only then will I have a chance to live a full life.