Why You Don't Know Who You Are

Our problems are obvious. 

It’s not hard to spot them. Just look around, read the news, scroll Twitter for half an hour. People are not happy. 

The reason for this perplexes many of us. The answer is so simple many of us cannot see it.  At the bottom of all our unhappiness is alienation.

We are separated, divorced from the things we most long to be connected to. We are imprisoned in our individual worlds, separated from God, from nature, from family, from community, and from ourselves. All of our problems extend from this underlying alienation. 

Alienation from oneself is the most damaging sort. Before you can be in a productive relationship with another, you have to be a whole, integrating self. Before you can be unified with another, you must be a unity.

You don’t have to be perfect, but you must be on the road to being who you are. You must value growth. You must have the humility to subject yourself to the principles that govern human relations.

People who are alienated from themselves turn their relationships into arenas for drama born of selfish agendas. They play winner take all games hoping to get their needs met.  They have no other option. They do not know themselves and therefore cannot know others.

Our culture makes the problem worse.  We live in a society so filled by distractions we rarely notice our alienation. Our ignorance is a victory for the engineers of our culture. The culture of constant spectacle is not there merely to provide you something new to see, but to prevent you from seeing what matters, namely how disconnected and isolated you are.

We know more about the actors on television, more about our favorite sports team than about the contours of our own inner motivations, desires, and longings. Our culture urges us to remain in this state perpetually. The very structure of our way of life incentivizes never-ending emotional and spiritual adolescence. It does not demand we mature into self knowledge, but asks us to live as zombified consumers, reflecting the agendas of those in charge. 

They want you to spend, so you spend. They want you to consume, so you consume. This has become so normalized most people now mistake the desires inculcated into them by consumer culture for their own. Knowledge of their true desires has been supplanted by advertising.

Consider the iPhone. Millions believe they desire a new iPhone because Apple told them they do. Multiply this by all the corporations, all the brands, all the noise. The end result is a population not of full mature human beings, but of people who are in fact only walking replications of the desires of those seeking profit.

The solution begins in silence. Our noisy culture fears silence. Silence threatens to overturn the established order. It is in silence and self reflection, that our real wishes surface. In silence, we recognize genuine desire. 

Without silence we rarely come to know our true longings. Like the subtle buzz of fluorescent lights, these longings have been with us our whole lives and we've never attended to them. Silence helps us finally understand what until now seemed like meaningless static.

There are many ways to practice silence. What matters is that you start. Doesn't have to be long. Five minutes will do. Five minutes of silence can help make you more aware of who you are. Five minutes of silence can bring you home. From there, you can use what you learn to build a life that reflects who you are, rather than who you have been told to be by the million loud voices in your lonely ear.

If you need help with this, you can always click here to book a quick call with me to talk about how we might work together to help you start getting free of the agendas and false beliefs that are holding you back and get you moving immediately in the right direction.