Pattern interrupt your way to fulfillment

I believe most people operate on autopilot allowing habits, routines, conditioning, and fear to dictate their lives.

We start peaceful, certain, and pure as children. This state is close to our true selves but over time, we are shaped by external influences including our parents, our teachers, our peers, and society at large.

We need this input to learn, grow and function within society, and humans, being social creatures also gain fulfillment and purpose from fitting in, having a shared purpose, and being a part of a community.

The more we get sucked into this game, the more we potentially compromise ourselves to fit in. This altered self becomes a mask that we wear, tailored to impress people we perceive as higher up in the tribal hierarchy thereby raising our own status.

This mask becomes the ego-self, a requirement for us to function within society but when we deviate too far from our true selves we end up doing things for the wrong reasons, forgetting that we created this mask and that it's not the real us.

We pursue careers, build businesses, alter our appearance, or choose partners and friends according to this game, carefully curating our external visage.

There is of course nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities but the intention is important.

The more separation between the desires of our true self and our eg0-self, the more dissonance we create, manifesting as stress, uncertainty, and discomfort. The highs are there but they are short-lived and something is missing.

This becomes a hedonic treadmill as we continue on this false path trying to fill the void, using these superficial status symbols as a proxy for self-worth or to appease a fear of rejection or abandonment.

Often, these activities are validated by a society blindly playing the same game and so it can be hard to get off the treadmill. Even if awareness briefly surfaces, taking action to change course can feel like swimming against the tide.

The longer this all goes on, the more the stress and uncertainty caused by the dissonance compounds causing all sorts of problems - both physical health issues but also psychological problems and eventually regrets, which accumulate over time.

And the longer it goes, the more there is 'to lose' and the sunk cost fallacy makes it difficult to break out.

At this point, there are a few options: