If You’re Not Living The Life You Thought You'd Have, One Of These 4 Patterns Is Probably In Charge
Lola Russian | Pexels If you're not living the life you thought you'd have, you're not alone: Most people in modern-day developed nations are numbed out, half-asleep, and living lives of quiet despair. They are disconnected from their bodies, glued to their digital devices, and have little to no social contact of any depth or emotional significance. This general state of malaise leads those same people to depression, disease, and a sense of disconnection that negatively impacts every area of their lives.
Around one in six people worldwide are experiencing loneliness, according to the WHO Commission on Social Connection. Their research showed that lonely people are twice as likely to experience depression, and social isolation increases the risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and cognitive decline.
What’s even more disheartening is that we are, in many ways, actively encouraged to stay asleep. Marketing tells us that we aren’t good enough. That we need to be fixed, or saved from our own inherent unlovability. Nutrient-less manufactured foods that keep us psychologically hazy and tired. Honeycomb homes and work cubicles keep us isolated and separated from each other and from natural light. But does it have to be this way?
How do you wake up from the societally imposed stupor that has us all walking around like zombies? Four patterns keep people asleep and far away from living the life they thought they'd once have.
If you’re not living the life you thought you'd have, one of these 4 patterns is probably in charge:
1. Misalignment
We all have messages in our hearts about the things that we want to do with our lives. Maybe you know that you need to write a book within your lifetime. Or become a doctor. Or hike a famous trail halfway across the world. Or take up ballet dancing. Or send an extended gratitude note to someone you barely know.
These messages have been planted in the deepest part of your heart by a force that is unknowable. And, often, they have been there for as long as you can remember. As long as you continue to ignore these messages of courage, creativity, and mystery, you will suffer. Your heart speaks to you, and you ignore it. And just like a jilted, ignored lover, over time, it stops communicating with you as frequently or as loudly.
Researchers looked at data from over 66,000 people and found that having a sense of purpose in life was linked to lower levels of both depression and anxiety. When you ignore what your heart is telling you to do and drift through life without direction, your mental health takes a real hit. Perhaps you have been able to quiet these messages with alcohol, fast food, or any other means of distraction, but the truth remains in your body. If you choose a safe path in your life in order to be practical, then you will pay a price for that.
A so-called comfortable life is most often a direct route to a life of quiet despair, mediocrity, anxiety, and low-level anger (also known as boredom). The further out of alignment you are, the more you are at war with yourself. Plain and simple.
2. Escape
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Another common way to stay asleep in your life is to create no attachments. No bonds. No relationships. No sense of home. No structure, routine, or habits. The lone wolf mentality will serve you well if you want to lead a life of isolation and needlessly heavy burdens.
“A rolling stone gathers no moss.” In other words, a person who is afraid to put down roots and settle anywhere will rarely prosper. Perhaps your ego wants to convince you that you are special, that you are the unique case that that proverb doesn’t apply to, but you are still human. And certain truths are unavoidable.
Studies show that social connection is actually one of the strongest predictors of survival and health across all social species. People with stronger social bonds are more likely to live longer and healthier lives, while isolation has health risks similar to those of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
By escaping any commitments in your life (to a career, to friendships, to intimate relationships, to a sense of routine or habit), you will continue to feel heavy, burdened, isolated, and hard done by. But it will it will have been double-y painful because it will have been your own doing.
3. Avoidance
The single greatest teacher that helps us become more fully alive is pain. The single greatest way that we sabotage our sense of aliveness is by avoiding pain.
When we avoid our pain — either by active suppression or by denying its existence — we fall increasingly asleep, bit by bit. When we don’t fully lean into the reality of our pain, we combat our natural state of aliveness. Pain is a great teacher, but it is a brutal one:
- Your best friend moves away, and you don’t allow yourself to feel it.
- Your parents divorced/died/beat you/told you you weren’t good enough, and you never let the pain rip its way through you.
- Close loved ones die, and you don’t allow yourself to grieve.
- You were bullied/emotionally abused/overtly shamed when you were younger, and no one ever told you that what happened to you was wrong.
Any pain you avoid feeling slowly chips away at your sense of aliveness.
4. Self-rejection
Ultimately, misalignment, escape, and avoidance all have a consistent through line, and that is that they each have self-rejection interwoven into them.
You reject yourself when you tell your pain that you are not willing to feel it. You reject yourself when you tell yourself that the truths in your heart are not worthy of being listened to. You reject yourself when you allow your ego to convince you that you are not like other people… and that you don’t need to connect to others (or a city, or a career, or hobbies).
When you take on the live truth that any part of you is wrong, broken, or unlovable, you progressively lose your sense of self until you don’t know who you are anymore. How can you feel more alive and love yourself in the process?
In many ways, the pathway to being more fully alive lies in the correlates of the previous four. But, as is often the case, these things are easier said than done. In order to come more fully alive, you will likely need to (lovingly) rip out the roots of your old mode of being in the world, and plant seeds of self-love in their place. The path to being more fully alive and living the life you thought you'd have comes down to alignment, commitment, feeling full, and self-acceptance.
Jordan Gray is a five-time Amazon best-selling author, public speaker, and relationship coach with more than a decade of practice. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Women's Health, and The Good Men Project, among countless others.
