I wanted to succeed, so my life fell apart. In tenth grade, I stopped the sport that I did for years, started my first AP course, and I threw myself into school. I occasionally still look up the email that I sent to my coach: “I don’t feel like I have time to commit to crew this upcoming season.”
You know when you make the right decision, but you probably made it for the wrong reasons? I think this was that time. Within a few weeks, the line between weekdays and the weekend blurred. I gave up more and more time for the dream that I was chasing. I just didn’t know what that dream was. I kept hustling, working to cut my way through the darkness and come out on the other side. I never did.
“If imitation is suicide,” I wrote 547 days later, “I must already be dead.”
In those months, I dedicated myself to the grind, “working.” If I had free time, I’d dedicate it to school. If I was done with my school work, I had blogs to maintain. I kept working. It felt great.
If you asked me if I was happy at that time, I would have given a superlative yes. I still feel nostalgia for those days every once in a while. But emotions are anything but a test if the life you are living is good. Life is usually a cycle of fluctuating happiness with inflection points marked by discovering new truths. I was pursuing the goals I wanted, I thought. But I wasn’t. I was living someone else’s life.
In Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, he argues that by the time we get to adulthood, we are so “domesticated” by the desires and expectations of others that our internal compass is just a mirage of what we really want. In reality, it’s the extension of the external vision set out before us since we were young. I had been giving myself up to a system of conformity.
I can’t point to an epiphany in which I escaped from this system and came out a stronger man. Like most realizations, it was gradual. I started becoming uncomfortable with how agreeable I was. I was nice to make myself feel comfortable. I did things so other people would like me. Having the courage to be disliked is the apex of altruism. It puts the truth above your own transient desires.
I started to develop the power to be dissatisfied, and I started to carve my own life’s path. I started to believe in my individualism. And it was when I stopped using blind emotion as a guide to if the live I was living was my best life that I began to live.
I’ve come to understand that dissatisfaction is the impetus for innovation. It pushes you to change things and address the flawed systems in our world.
Creativity, of course, is not always an ultimate expression of individualism. However, it’s a start. It’s one step closer to understanding who you are and what you care about — uncensored by the domestication you have experienced for so long. Creativity allows me to identify problems in the world and fix them — problems I only recognize due to dissatisfaction. Escaping the treadmill of consumption and regurgitation that school has programmed into me is difficult — it is not emotionally pleasant. But, it’s a journey towards truth. And when our lives are moving towards a state of truth rather than simply happiness, that is when true happiness emerges. As Viktor Frankl wrote decades ago: happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
