Have you ever been to a gathering you simply did not want to go to in the first place?

You knew it before you left the house—but you went anyway.

You showed up and gave it your best shot… and it just didn’t get any better.

You finally hit a point where you accept that you REALLY don’t belong there, and spend the next 15 minutes to 2 hours trying to create an exit plan.

Only to conclude that the only way out…is an Irish goodbye.

You slip out unnoticed, liberated by the avoidance of all the excuses and goodbyes you didn’t feel like giving.

Now I want you to try something else instead, a new type of Irish goodbye, but a permanent one.

The type where you silently say goodbye to the aimless and endlessly looping path that society is pushing onto us all.

I want you to look at everything that existence has offered you in the last 5 years, turn 90 degrees and walk away, and never ever say goodbye.

Because after all, you were never supposed to be doing things this way anyways.

Let me start this by asking for a second time: What are you here (on Earth) for?

This is probably the most important question any human can ask themselves, so important that we are failing our current and future selves if we are not asking ourselves this question at least once a year. Even more so in a modern world slowly eroding what the ‘meaning of life’ truly is.

I get it, this question is pretty scary and vague and, ugh, what does it even mean?

Don’t worry we’ll get there, but maybe it’s easier to answer the opposite question first:

What are you NOT here and alive on Earth to do?

Do you really feel that you were just born here to pass the time until you die?

Here to follow an extremely narrow life path that gets more boring each day, until you can retire and be even more bored?

Were you really born to sit in fear of the unknown while watching others out there chasing their dreams?

Are you here to exercise your thumbs more than your body or mind? Scrolling yourself into numbness?

Here to binge watch Netflix every night?

Here to party and live the same nights you won’t really remember, over and over again?

Here to sit and waste your energy in comment sections and DMs?

I know you know the answer to all of these. And whether you believe in one god, multiple gods, or no gods at all…all of them are saying the same thing too: NOPE.

Now, I’m not here to attack you, but I am trying to challenge you, the same way I challenge myself.

Because if you’re here, then you obviously care enough about leaving your mental comfort zone and thinking outside of your current identity.

And if you care about this, then you already know all the answers we are seeking in life lie outside of our comfort zones, in the tough questions we tend to avoid asking ourselves.

But just because the questions are hard doesn’t mean you need to have an answer pop into your head right away.

Yes our mind needs time to weigh the variables, but our body will have an answer almost immediately: our initial visceral response.

What do you feel when you ask yourself this question?

In my experience, there are 3 main visceral responses here:

We all need to answer this question—and ask it often.

If you felt #1 or #2, I would argue that you really need to sit down and answer this question sooner than anyone who felt #3.

Because if this question triggered something big in you—positive or negative—there’s gold in that assurance or discomfort.

Whether that reaction was positive (certainty) or negative (overwhelming), that highly emotional response is a tell, and it’s telling you that you are triggered by this question and even more by the thoughts and feelings that pop up as a result.

And anytime we are triggered, it’s an invitation to dive deeper and do the work.

But before we do the work, we need to understand why there is work to be done.

Meaning and purpose have been in a free fall in the last two decades, and it’s no coincidence that the shift away from these pillars of meaning that held up past generations coincides with the invention of smartphones + social media.

Whether it’s the shift towards hyper-individualism, the decreasing religiosity of developed nations, or the blurred lines of traditional gender roles, we have seen these massive pillars shift more rapidly than our brains can keep up.

Now add in the tiny TVs in our pockets, pulling us in a million different directions, and the ability to see what everyone is doing all at once, and it’s easy to see why the human brain is rupturing at the seams, and why we all feel so lost.

So let’s look deeper at what gave our ancestors meaning, so we can better understand where meaning is being lost here in our generation.

Now let’s be clear, some of these pillars of meaning from past era’s truly needed to go, as they simply don’t suit humanity now the way they did 50-100 years ago.

But how can we combine the best of both eras? It’s a really tough question that requires us to dive deeper, to look at what past generations got right and what they got wrong because they didn’t know any better.

So let’s take a look at a few constants of meaning in life, with some help from Arthur Brooks and Jonathan Haidt:

Now that we are looking at this issue with so much objectivity, the answer becomes crystal clear.

Yet no matter how clear it is, we can’t help but feel the smothering sense of discomfort that comes from our own uncertainty.

END OF PART 1

NEXT WEEK 📆

We will dive right back into that discomfort, to see how some of the most uncomfortable aspects of the human experience are extremely necessary to generate our meaning, our purpose, and the energy needed to sustain true growth, the type of growth that propels us out of the prisons of our own making.

Until then, stop avoiding and start asking yourself the hard questions.

Short-term pain = long-term gain