Day 1: Numb
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was depressed.
I was 23 years old. And after 18 months away from home, I was back in my parents house. To stay, as far as I knew, since I had no plans of going anywhere soon.
Being the New Year, I wanted to reflect on where I’d been and use the opportunity to set some new goals for myself.
So I cracked open my well-worn copy of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. The first time I’d read it was six years before, during my freshman year of college. And it was the reason I’d moved all the way across the country after graduating to study with some of the best marketers in the world.
And in that time I had, in a sense, achieved my dreams.
I had dreamed of getting to work 1-on-1 with one of my favorite authors, a billionaire philosopher with homes across the world. And it had come true.
I had dreamed of working with the man whose book taught me everything I know about money, and who ran a multi-million dollar business from his laptop between apartments in NYC and San Francisco. And that, too, had come true.
“What’s next?” I thought to myself?
I turned to one of chapters on goal setting. “Dreamlining” as it’s called in the book. It had always been my preferred method of thinking about goals. Because instead of asking simply yourself “What do you want?” dreamlining took it a step further and asks “What gets you excited?”
So I pulled out a sheet of paper, and I asked myself, “What gets me excited?”
And I just sat there.
So I asked myself again. And finally answers started to come.
“Skydiving might be fun.”
“I could move to LA.”
“What if I made $250,000 this year?”
But as I thought of each one, I felt nothing.
“Technically that would be fun. I guess.”
“It would be cool to have that much money. I guess.”
“I dunno. What would I even do in LA?”
I hadn’t noticed it until that moment, but I felt numb. Almost dead inside. I “could” do that stuff, but I just as easily could do without it.
Dreamlining was supposed to be all about discovering what EXCITES you. And I had discovered that nothing did. Everything I came up with left me cold and unmoved.
The reality was that for the past 18 months, I had been miserable.
In 2014 I had left college with a hundred grand in student loans and a deathly fear that my degree in Philosophy would leave me useless to the world.
As a result I became obsessed with becoming “exceptional” — a twenty-something bestselling author or millionaire. I would be one of the “New Rich” as Tim Ferriss describes in The 4-Hour Workweek. I’d read 100 books a year and make at least $250,000 a year from my laptop while traveling the world.
I began devouring self-help books, blogs, podcasts, forums, and courses. I was going to do things right and prove to the world I was someone special.
For work, I chose to specialize in sales and marketing. Because that was the “smart” thing to do. “Everything is sales” as they say. “If you can sell, you’ll always be able to make money.” So I got myself a job in a high-paying industry and moved across the country, to a small town where there wasn’t a single friend or family member for at least a thousand miles.
I was doing everything right. Getting up early. Staying in the office late. Working on weekends.
And I was miserable.
I knew it, too. But I wouldn’t allow it.
I’ve revisited journals from that time. I literally used to write “I feel like I’m dying inside,” followed by “Stop wallowing. Remember — if you do well here, you’ll be able to call the shots in life.”
There was a saying I used to repeat to myself: Live like no one else will, so you can live like no one else can.
So I buried my feelings. They’d rear up, and I’d squash them. It was a daily battle. But I was determined. I was “on my path” and nothing was going to stop me.
Someone asked me what my gut was telling me. I laughed in their face. “What does that even mean?”
And it was true. I didn’t know. I had desensitized myself so much that I couldn’t hear my gut screaming out to me almost every day: “Dude, this fucking SUCKS!!!”
So by the time I got a remote job and returned home, I was numb. I had learned to squash the pain. But without meaning to, I’d also learned to squash the joy.