Life: "Why Modern Adult Life Doesn't Have To Suck" By alx.O

How far does one have to walk before they can accept that they've made a mistake and then turn around and head back?

I've lost sleep trying to answer that question and even now, I still don't know. But what I do know, is that you have to know why you're walking in the first place; without that the whole thing is meaningless. And I know this because I've felt the acute pain and displacement from wandering around without a why, yet as I say that I'm sure we all have. I'm sure we all have felt that void that comes from a drone like existence; that absent minded drudgery of modern life in society.

What is the Drudgery:
You wake up, you go to work, you try your best there to find purpose but its always fleeting, you leave work, you run errands, you try to keep a social life but that's more work than reward, you head home and hopefully it's time to relax but if your a parent than its time for job number 2, you get the kids fed, cleaned and to bed, you catch up on some late night netflix, you fall asleep and then repeat the whole process again and again for years.

At some point if you don't know why you're doing it, the drudgery eventually becomes toxic and starts to kill you slowly from within. And that is unfortunately where many of us are today, slowly dying inside from the toxicity of the drudgery. So why are we doing it?

Well I can only speak for myself but I believe it's because I don't know how to properly gauge the difference between surviving and living. Yet in my defense, it's not like I was ever taught the difference; in school or by anyone I've ever known. I was never shown that those two words weren't interchangeable or synonymous. So I've lived a large part of my life believing that they were the same thing. But that's just not true.

In fact, if i'm being honest, all I really know is survivorship. I don't know what living is. I thought I did. I thought walking in a single direction because it could bring you money and because money is important for living that, that was what living was about. But it's not, that's survivorship. Living, as I'm finding out, requires something more, something intangible and even hard to fully express in words but if I had to sum it up I'd do so with the word passion.

A life with passion is a life with a “why” and that “why” has the power to stop the drudgery from ever becoming toxic. Passion is the only true compass we have in this tattered map of a life. So as a compass, passion is the only thing that can tell us when we've walked to far in the wrong direction or if we need to walk further.

And the beautiful thing about passion is that it exist in us regardless of us, we cannot control what we are passionate about. This lack of control is what makes passion a true compass. All we have to do is listen to it and follow. Which is no cake walk, in itself, but it’s definitely a more fruitful walk.

And so I have to be honest with myself about where I've been walking to. I have to start listening to my compass and start heading in the direction its telling me. And if I'm being honest, I think it's telling me to head back and start over in another direction.

What is your compass telling you?