The past 3 weeks I’ve been in a bit of a rut.

And rut feels light. I’ve felt like an aimless pile of mud, a stack of old clothes in the dirty hamper maybe.

I don’t know where to go, don’t know what to do.

I feel… not lost, but for sure aimless. There’s a level of apathy in my actions. I just don’t care. I’m just drifting.

Work is just that, work. It provides an income, nourishment for the body but not the soul. It comprises of consumption in empty calories that bloat the soul.

Except my work isn’t consuming calories, it’s consuming my precious Earthly being.

I’ve long since grappled with this sense of Meaning. Intellectually I think I’ve found the answer… well an answer.

It’s one that many agree upon – different verbiage maybe, but they all seem to overlap on a few simple ideas.

Japan’s ‘Ikigai’, or a Reason for Being

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – Self-Actualization

The Finn’s Sisu, or doing hard things.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”

Victor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning, Auschwitz survivor:
1) Creating work/doing a deed
2) Experiencing something or someone
3) Attitude toward unavoidable suffering

Bluezones: (longest lifespans on earth)

• Community
• Sense of Purpose

Another consolidation: The Pursuit Of

Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
“if you get the right kind of relationship between yourself and other people, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself”

Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks
“Happiness is Direction”, podcast

Kurt Vonnegut’s On Becoming

Granted, many of those are modern sources within the last 100 years, but many draw from sources much older. And human’s seem to keep coming up with a handful of ideas on Happiness.

Nearly all science on happiness seems to have one primary driver:
The quality of your relationships.

Harvard 85 year happiness study shows us that very clearly.

The second component, though a bit more tailored to the individual, also overlaps:
A sense of Purpose.

1) Relationships.
2) Your creations.
3) Your attitude.
(more sources here here & here for the last one)

Purpose in and of itself is a vague idea, it can mean so many different things. Dr. Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis attempts to categorize it as a ‘connection to something greater’.

I’ve since found my own adaptation that seems to work:
Creation.

For me that’s writing, photography, poetry, rhyming, drawing.
Ironically often seen as primarily feminine, these hobbies give me an immeasurable amount of life. And everyone’s got to find their own outlet for creation.

In Mark Twight’s ‘greater‘, he references the Collective Conscious. As a free-solo climber, he realized if he died and never shared the wisdom, the Collective Conscious would miss out on all that he’d gained over the years. He has since opened a gym, trained celebrities, and consolidated his thoughts… for humanity to find, enjoy, use, and build upon.

The monk Thich Nhat Hanh in his Peace is Every Step describes the interconnectedness of all beings – the tree needs soil and sunlight and fellow trees, and flowers need bees, and bees need trees. It all needs each other to work.

He similarly describes interconnected of Human Creations – electricity for light, light to let us work, paper to write, cars to commute, roads to commute and roads to work. Each of these are mere human inventions.

Each invention opens a new door of inventions and creations. It’s all connected. We all need each other to exist.

And the funny part is that Creation simultaneously seems to be the thing that so many philosophers, scientists, authors, inventors seem to attribute much of their well-being to.

So in a sense, Happiness is Creation?

“A life lived for art is never a life wasted”

Macklemore

“There was never a goal there never was I’m trying to see where my zenith is”

Russ

“That he not busy being born
Is busy dying”

Bob Dylan

Kurt Vonnegut captures it oh so nicely:
“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”

I’ve found in the past few weeks I let my habit to create deteriorate. I’ve been in Purgatory because I’ve allowed myself to languish. I’ve consumed, but not created.

And that, my friend, just as protein shakes without workouts are wasted calories, consuming without creating wastes the mind.

And I use that word loosely – Creation.

Making anything. Doing things. Investing. Baking. Skating. Whatever
But going out and experiencing, interacting is what gives us life… reruns of FRIENDS don’t give us life. Lying and thinking with no action doesn’t give us life.

It’s the thought to action to execution.

These past few weeks, I haven’t put anything in to the world. I haven’t curated my mind at all. Ultimately that means no progress. I’ve felt aimless because I’ve been aimless. I haven’t gone anywhere.

It’s easy for us to trap ourselves in these 8 hours with what others tell us to do, come home exhausted, workout, make dinner, and do laundry. It’s so incredibly easy to allow ourselves to just exist.

But that’s when life starts to slip us by.

That’s when we stop driving and sell ourselves to the backseat of a beat-up Honda.

It’s precisely when the Regrets start to kick in.

All I needed was to interact with my mind again. I needed something to be excited about. I needed to create.

It doesn’t matter what, just that I do. I edited some photos, made some AI images, and wrote in my journal a bit.

That was enough.
We’re back, baby.

And we ought to keep creating.
Without it, we drift.

So cheers to Creation, even if you’ve no idea where it’s headed…
especially then.

Cheers.