You won't grind your way to aliveness
a lesson in following our intuition
The universe delivers us lessons when we’re ready to receive them. These lessons often manifest as internal struggle, triggered by interpersonal conflict, uncertainty surrounding consequential decisions, or existential doubts. A lesson may present itself in new ways, over and over again — it’s only when we’re open to healing an old wound that we can learn what it has to teach us.
2024 delivered me a series of lessons, revealing the ways that I wasn’t yet free. New paradigms I’d stepped into and old dynamics that were ready to be unraveled.
A lesson that had presented itself daily finally came into my awareness: the way I was pursuing aliveness was depleting me.
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Howard Thurman
My search for aliveness has long been tethered to my search for meaningful work. I sought inspiration and aliveness through my work and considered enjoyable activities that took me away from my desk as a reward: an experience to be earned. After I finish this essay. After I send this email. After I wrap this project proposal.
After diversifying my core identity away from a traditional career, I entered a season of life where I filled my days with projects I cared deeply about: writing, studying applied positive psychology, and building The Commons. Work continued to function as my primary vehicle for meaning, becoming deeply entangled with my acts of self-expression. Work that once served as my vessel for creative expression became burdened by the pressure to consistently produce and manufacture meaning. It all had to mean something.
As the lines between work and self-expression blurred, my productivity and desire to create waned under the mounting demands of output and financial sustainability. Although I’d set fire to old scripts, I’d subconsciously began operating from new scripts.
As I’d peeled back the layers of societal conditioning, I came into contact with more of myself — a purer version of who I was underneath all the external shoulds. The trouble was that I hadn’t yet learned that the nature of turning inward is that the shoulds become more and more subtle. As aspects of my life came into alignment, other more subtle shoulds revealed themselves.
The reality that my new portfolio of work had awakened states of aliveness and flow in me spawned a new belief: that work really should be my main source of meaning. As these new scripts quietly took root, they co-opted the progress I’d made in expanding my identity.
At year’s end, when I looked back on the moments I felt most alive, a different truth emerged: it wasn’t the days I spent cranking away at my desk, but the moments I was moving my body, connecting with family and friends, or adventuring in nature. My best days consisted of deep flowy work sessions and awe-inspiring moments with people I love.
Those days, I came to my desk inspired and motivated, dancing toward purposefulness. It all felt inevitable. Yet, for as many days the flow just flowed, there were twice as many days when I forcibly willed myself to dance when no music played.
The object isn’t to make art,
it’s to be in that wonderful state
which makes art inevitable.
— Robert Henri
Despite the fact that the days I spent grinding away all blurred together, I couldn’t shake the notion that meaningful work came above all else.
Clarity arrived in an unexpected way in December: on an emergency family trip. I flew out to Beijing with my mom and brother to be with my grandmother after she was admitted to the ICU. I was amidst finals season at school and yet, I knew with every fiber of my being that I needed to be in Beijing. Despite being jetlagged and grappling with the reality of my grandmother nearing end of life, I found brief moments of flow writing papers in the afternoons, nestled between mornings spent connecting with my mom and brother and late afternoon trips to the hospital. (Fittingly, my final papers investigated what it means to live a meaningful life.)
Back at home, when I suppressed my desire to be inspired and connected, I inevitably operated from disconnection. Yet, self-expression and creativity flow as a byproduct of harnessing possibility and wonder in our lives. Our best work rarely emerges when we’re deprioritizing our bodies and souls. By putting work and self-expression above all else, I closed myself off to drawing inspiration from other areas of my life.
As a result of shaking up my daily routine, I saw the new paradigm I’d trapped myself in with clear eyes. This self-imposed constraint was a defense mechanism that had protected me in an old paradigm.
After a career of early morning meetings, I became fiercely protective of my mornings. When I finally made my schedule my own, I found it deeply nourishing to reserve my mornings for meditating, journaling, and writing. I basked in the morning stillness. Slowly, I pushed my “morning” hours further and further into the day. I became militant about no “distractions” until early afternoon. The restrictions I once needed to recover from having no time to myself expanded to constrain the rest of my day. What was meant to create space and flow became rigid and stifling.
I convinced myself that all my days needed to start a certain way and resisted new ways my day could unfold. When exciting opportunities arose—an interesting call, a new workout class—I clenched to what “worked.”
As I clung to preserving my morning hours, it became clear that the rigidity was contributing to states of contraction. When I held the desire to dedicate the morning to writing and being alone too tightly, I missed signs from my body that were whispering: I’m being deprived of inspiration. I want to work out. I’d prefer to go out for a walk and see what words emerge.
When we’re too precious about maintaining the constraints we’ve set for ourselves, we ignore our intuition and fail to cultivate the self-trust needed to free ourselves from over-optimizing.
The irony of optimizing our lives is that the nature of optimization is rooted in a lack of self-trust. We inherently don’t trust ourselves so we put systems in place to take the thought out of it. While setting constraints is a good short-term solution in bridging our self-trust gap, the ultimate goal is to build a reserve of self-kept promises that help us restore faith in our intuition rather than further optimize a system that keeps us caged.
My morning ritual took shape during a global lockdown when I was checking my phone every few minutes. Now, I no longer have the impulse to check my texts hundreds of times a day — as a result, I no longer need to hold myself back from the desire to take a break after a deep work session to connect with a friend. There’s a difference between following an impulse to procrastinate versus a genuine desire to connect meaningfully.
This year, I’m cultivating moments of wonder and seeking aliveness through moving my body, spending time with people I love, and being in nature, allowing the overflow to spill into my work and self-expression rather than grind on empty.
What lessons did you learn in 2024? What intentions are guiding you this year?
Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)
Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.
Nice post! I especially loved this: "The irony of optimizing our lives is that the nature of optimization is rooted in a lack of self-trust. We inherently don’t trust ourselves so we put systems in place to take the thought out of it. While setting constraints is a good short-term solution in bridging our self-trust gap, the ultimate goal is to build a reserve of self-kept promises that help us restore faith in our intuition rather than further optimize a system that keeps us caged."
Great job.