Get To Know Yourself

Matthew Olk had everything at 32. An impressive corporate job in Chicago with a salary most people can’t refuse. By his own measure, he was winning. But something was missing. “I had it all on paper,” he wrote later in his book, Tree of Life Within, “but beneath the surface, my soul was withering.” His achievements protected him from an emptiness he refused to face. “I was a tree that appeared strong and thriving, but my roots were brittle, whispering the truth I couldn’t yet admit. I was disconnected, exhausted, and lost.” He now invests in a lifestyle that allows him to reconnect with the part of him he ignored for years. You might not have a six-figure salary. But you know what he is talking about. Especially when what you have looks impressive.

Right now, life is engineered as a cycle.

We repeat the processes of waking up, getting to work, coming back, trying the impossible task of disconnecting from stress. And then repeating the process the next day. The missing things in our lives are not things we can buy. Or achievements to unlock. You can only find them if you have the courage to go against the ready-made life. “The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself,” says psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Existential restlessness is a thing. People can experience it as boredom, mild depression, loss of self. Or the feeling that you are merely living, going through routines and responsibilities detached from your self. “We should be fully born when we die — although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born,” says Fromm.

But the onus is completely on you to be awake to all of life.

It’s probably why psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said no instinct tells you what to do, and no tradition what you ought to do; sometimes you don’t even know what you wish to do. Instead, you either wish to do what other people do (conformism) or you do what other people tell you to do (totalitarianism). Whatever you do, you have to choose your best path forward. That freedom is terrifying. Most people avoid it. They fill their existential restlessness with distraction, achievement, and status. Don’t take your existential meaning for granted. And don’t forget meaningful attention. Most people are short of conscious focus on important or essential things. Philosopher Simone Weil once said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” It’s a moral act. It is how you love someone. It’s also how you make something real.

When you give your full attention to a person, you are telling them they matter. Apply the same mindset to your work, and you are telling yourself what you do matters. Mindless attention tells your brain the experience doesn’t matter. You are probably missing intentional attention. It’s not your fault. Everything is engineered to take you away from what you should be concentrating on. You have the ability to focus. The decision to focus will always be the problem. The willingness to close the tabs, put the phone away, and stay with one thing long enough for it to mean something is a skill. You can hone it. And improve it.

But you have to practice to get better at it.

Something else you are missing right now is the presence of yourself. Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt thought conscious immersion in anything or experience by yourself for yourself is a valuable skill. In solitude, she wrote, “I am ‘by myself,’ together with my self, and therefore two-in-one.” It’s not the same as loneliness. Solitude is fertile. Loneliness is barren. You need the first. You are drowning in the second. Novelist and poet Wendell Berry said, “We go away into solitude precisely so that we can better commune with others.” “The two are connected.” And then: “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.”

The path out of loneliness runs through solitude. Where you sit with yourself and discover that you are not empty.

People can’t stand themselves, so they avoid the company of themselves at all costs. They prefer getting distracted with infinite content. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion,” mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal wrote, “and yet this is the greatest of our miseries.” He continues, “For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.” You distract yourself from the very thing you need to face.

You are missing time alone with the presence of yourself.

Another paradox that baffles me is our always-on need for what psychologist Gordon Flett calls “mattering.” It is the feeling that you are valued, noticed, or that your existence registers on someone else’s radar. The feeling that you matter is a basic universal need. But seeking it from the wrong places or sources can make things worse. For many people, the absence of mattering, Flett says, takes them on the loneliness and depression path. They are missing quality connection. You can be surrounded by people and still not matter to any of them. You can be liked and still not be known. You can put on a connection act without experiencing it. Cheap substitutes for being seen don’t work.

But the risk of being truly known terrifies people so much that they would rather seek it the wrong places.

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.” — Simone Weil

You have to go through yourself first to make good connections.

The missing things of our lives are not hidden from us. They are not secrets to find. They are just buried under everything we have used to fill the space where they belong. Clear the space. Sit with your restlessness. Harvest all the wisdom you can from them. Start by looking within. What does your inner conscious self truly want? Don’t hurry the process. “One who looks inside, awakens,” Carl Jung said. Make time to sit with yourself and wait. Just be. If at all possible, try to have fun practising being in your presence without all the distractions that get in the way.

What you are missing right now is meaning, attention, solitude, connection and a good dose of silence. These are all habits. Choices you can make. And they feed each other. Silence creates space for attention. Attention makes real connection possible. Solitude helps you see what matters. Recover one, and the others begin to return. Frankl wrote, “Those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how.” That is what you are missing. Not a better how. A why. But a why ensures when you stop running away from yourself. The running is the problem. Turn towards yourself, but leave behind all the things you’ve used to fill the valuable void. Kierkegaard said, “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

You have not been who you are. You have been the sum of your distractions. You have been the busyness. The missing things are already very close. But they are buried under your distracted life. The answer is you.