How to Get Comfortable With Not Knowing

I think it's so interesting, you know, that for many people, and I'll put myself squarely in that camp of, you know, growing up with that feeling of, well, if I achieve this, then I will be you know, satisfied or I will be successful.

You know, and if I could master this, then I have reached that, you know.

If this, then that.

And that feeling of not enoughness, of incompleteness, of lack.

And, you know, I mean, is this...

Is this part of our DNA? Is this part of, you know, wiring? Is this the result of the stories we tell ourselves? Is this just something we heard growing up? Where does this all come from, Evan? You

know, I would say all of the above to what you just listed.

And, you know, I thought a lot about this.

I think essentially what it comes down to is identification.

Like,

what do we identify as? Who do we identify as? So in ancient traditions, they talk about the separate self.

And then in modern times, we talk about the ego.

I like to think of it as our personal identity.

So we think we're this person who is navigating this world with this history.

And these beliefs and the roles that we play, our circumstances, our successes and our failures, we think that this is entirely who we are.

And the problem, the dysfunction that comes from that is trying to find fulfillment in being that person, because that's not the function of that identity.

We need that.

We need that to bring action into the world.

We need that logic, that striving to achieve things in this world, but it has limits to what it can do.

It can't really help us find peace in the present moment because that's not what it was designed to do.

So we talk about identity.

I talk about certain, so this is what kind of what happened with me.

When I got laid off, I thought I was this person who worked at Facebook.

And then when that left, I was faced with the question, who am I now? So when we look to the outside world to tell us who we are, we're never going to be able to really hold on to that because everything in that sort of realm is temporary.

So I invite my clients to look at what's more permanent, what's more stable about them.