Dear you,
Even though I don’t know you personally, I can assure you that if you’re feeling lost in life, it’s no coincidence that we meet this way.
You see, I’ve been exactly where you currently are: feeling lost, existing in a dull world, as if you’ve just learned to live with the feeling of emptiness.
That’s why I wrote you this letter, one that I hope will rekindle all the light and existential courage that’s been sitting idle in your heart: the force that allows you to fully affirm life, in spite of everything that can go wrong.
And even if you feel low in this moment, know that there is nothing inherently wrong with you.
Yes, it is painful – but the pain you’re feeling right now is all part of a search that is bigger than yourself.
And instead of admitting defeat, I want you to know that you’re still capable of the courage to continue exploring your walk of life, your place in the world, and the role that you’re capable of taking on.
This, is exactly from where the new water of life springs, when you feel like you’ve been dwelling in an empty desert for too long.
Let me explain.
When you were still a child, the world was full of wonder.
There was so much to explore, so much still unknown, the future still full of dreams and mystery.
You were nothing but a magical ball of pure potential.
Now, as time has passed, some of that magic has slipped away.
You’ve grown bigger, smarter, and so has the world around you.
Gradually, the feelings of being free like a child have given way to the logical rationale of the modern, spreadsheet-littered world of grown-ups.
And maybe, even though you’re fitting in quite nicely on paper, life feels as if you’re just making your rounds, day in day out…
…without you even knowing what you’re doing it for.
You’ve got bills to pay.
You’ve got things to worry about.
And in the daily routine that you’ve built up for yourself, the lines between living and surviving have become slightly blurred.
Life has become more stable and repeatable, and even though that stability can feel nice in a way, you’re left wondering…
…where has the magic gone?
The Magic Never Really Left
The thing is, that magic has never fully gone away.
It just hasn’t been visited by your curiosity for a while.
Believe it or not, the magic is always around you in one way or another, and it’s waiting for you and ready to be found again.
To get practical, there are hundreds of listicles on the internet with things you can practically do to make yourself feel better.
Things like revisiting your values, building new habits, keeping a gratitude journal, exercising, journaling, etcetera.
And even though those are all things that can genuinely help you out, they’re useless if you can’t connect them with your inner drive that sparks a sense of fulfilment.
If you cannot first reconnect with yourself, you’ll only end up consuming to consume.
How You’ll Find Your Way Back To Yourself
To be honest, when I was feeling totally lost in life, I fell into the self-development trap of reading self-help books after self-help books, journals, coaching stuff, meditation apps, podcasts – there’s an entire industry out there ready to fill in the void.
Being busy with “developing myself” felt good, but even so, I kept on feeling lost again and again and again.
Wanna know why?
Because I never took the time to sit with my inner voice.
It was too painful, too empty, too uncomfortable to face whatever I had to face there.
But here’s the thing: if you cannot connect with your genuine inner compass, you can jump high and low, but ultimately, you’re just distracting yourself from the thing that really wants to be found.
If you cannot face what it is that is begging for your attention, chances are that you’ll stay stuck, trapped inside the hamster wheel of self-help.
So, here’s the truth: you can find your way back to the light again, but you need to connect wholeheartedly with your inner compass first.
It’s the only place where ‘the answers’ can be found.
If you find yourself capable of doing that, you’ll find the direction you need to grow into your true Self, ultimately aligning yourself with your life’s work.
This is the way.
From there, no matter what you do, even the smallest things or accents in your daily life can serve a purpose.
A purpose that makes even the biggest obstacles worth the hassle, because it’s all supported by that inner voice that only you can feel.
An inner voice that guides you to wholeness, a destination with no end, possibly taking your entire lifetime to reach – but a quest nonetheless filled with meaning, purpose, and joy.
But here’s the invaluable paradox: the not-knowing, and the pains of growth that come with that quest, are all part of it.
So trust me when I say that it’s okay to be lost. We all get lost – but we create ourselves by losing, and finding back ourselves, again and again and again.
It’s a universal experience that is inherent to the human experience itself.
And it is exactly this element of the human experience that justifies the pains of being lost: it’s part of the process of becoming your whole, genuine Self.
Finding Back Your Inner Drive
Here’s the part I wish someone had told me. Two things worth knowing about your inner drive:
1. You already have that drive. You never lost it; It never went away. You simply unlearned how to see it.
2. Contrary to modern, hustle-culture-esque belief, you don’t need to articulate it upfront. You only need to recognise and trust its signals.
Because here’s what that drive actually does: it directs your attention. It’s the silent force behind what pulls you in, what you keep returning to, what you find yourself curious about for reasons you can’t quite name.
Your Future Self Is Always Reaching Out
Those pulls aren’t random, they’re signals.
And here’s what’s amazing about it: your future Self is manifesting itself through those very interests.
What feels like mere curiosity in the present moment is often the disguised shape of your future Self that you’re becoming, reaching to get your attention.
And if you pay attention, you’ll notice these signals scattered throughout your day. Sometimes you can’t even explain why a particular thing catches you. But the interest itself is the proof: if that thing returns to you, again and again, it wants to become a part of you.
It’s part of who you’re truly are.
This continual search for uniting yourself with what your future Self already holds is what gives life meaning, fulfilment, and direction.
It’s also what gives life its strange turns, its unpredictable nature, its abstractness.
Yet simultaneously, as long as you’re aligned with your inner drive, it renders most of your suffering powerless…
…not to be confused with less painful…
…because even the most banal forms of struggle start to serve something higher than the present moment: the becoming of who you genuinely are.
Now I know this might sound abstract. But you don’t have to believe it. It’s not a religion. It’s just an idea that once it clicks, it becomes a very practical way of seeing your life.
Because here’s the important distinction: your future Self doesn’t need you to understand what you’re going toward.
Just like when you were a kid – and you simply pursued whatever got your heart racing – you were an explorer. That’s why you felt so much magic, because you engaged with that magic.
The good news is that being an adult doesn’t mean giving that up.
Actually, being a grown-up, you can now choose to have both: the wonder of the child and the groundedness of the adult.
Most people don’t, because modern life is designed to keep your attention pointed outward: at screens, at products, at everything that isn’t you. We live in a society that excels at estranging you from your Self.
But!
You can turn it back. You can become sensitive again to the signals pointing not toward the next external remedy, thing to buy, thing to achieve, but toward the Self that wants to awaken in you.
Ultimately, that is the quest. And it’s the only one that fulfils in a way nothing else can.
So keep going. Keep searching. Because I can’t guarantee you that you’ll ever find your purpose.
But what I will stake my life on is that you’ll become more alive by allowing the possibility that your search can be the purpose itself.
Remember that the answers to your questions lie in your attention, in how that attention drives you towards your whole, future Self.
Now, I wish to leave you with a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke, a 20th-century Austrian poet. He wrote it to a young man asking whether he should become a poet.
But the beauty of the text, I think, is that if you read it with becoming yourself in mind wherever he mentions poet or artist, you’ll find it was written for you, too.
Goodbye for now, and may you find all that you’re looking for.
~ Samuel
P.S.: to help you out, I wrote a journalling program for re-connecting with yourself. It’s a PDF with six exercises that have helped me find my way in life, and I think it can do the same for you. You can find it here, free.
“Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.
Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.
But perhaps even after this descent into yourself and into your solitariness you will have to give up the idea of becoming a poet (the feeling that one could live without writing is enough, as I said, to make it something one should never do). But even then, to have taken pause in the way I am asking you to will not have been in vain.
Whatever happens, your life will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more than I can say”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Charlie Louth
