Why you are living just to never feel lonely…
Let’s just pause for a moment. Look around you. You’re probably holding your phone or laptop, maybe lying down on the couch or sitting up on the sofa, reading this. But don’t just focus on these words. Listen to the sounds around you, take in the sights, notice what the people in your house are doing. Forget what you need to do next, forget what’s happened so far, forget what you know and what you want to know, forget love, care, respect, pride, wealth, relationships. Forget your child’s name, your home address, your nationality, your religion, and experience a moment of loneliness. Detach yourself from every ounce of ‘self’ identity. Now just sit and look! What’s happening around you? What are you doing in it? Stay still, breathe slowly, and just watch the world for a moment, without any pre-context thoughts in your head.
If you pause for a moment, you’ll notice something strange. If you strip away everything materialistic and emotional from your life, you’re left with just a body, a soul, and an almost empty mind. This feeling might seem like loneliness at first, but it goes deeper.
Dopamine is the chemical that creates happiness in our brain. The funny thing about dopamine is that it only makes us happy when it increases from a lower level to a higher one. This happens when you win big in a game, get a good job, or see your baby after a long day. But dopamine also controls sadness, anger, and jealousy. When it drops from a higher value to a lower one, it creates negative emotions. This happens when you lose your job, your girlfriend cheats on you, or you’re unhappy with life and your finances. Most people feel okay with little to no fluctuations in their dopamine levels.
But when you stay still and observe life as it is, you’re forcing your brain to process information without disturbing dopamine variations. This is how you analyze better, think better, and avoid feelings of loneliness. This is what meditation does to your brain—it creates a stable flow of dopamine.
I wish we could stay in this moment forever, observing life as it is, reaching a yogi-level of conscious focus. But we can’t. We’re busy filling our brains with random noise, often to avoid confronting our loneliness.
Nobody told you to buy a new house, nobody told you to aspire to a new car, nobody told you to get married and have children, nobody told you to work your ass off and get that job, nobody told you to lick someone’s foot to get that promotion, nobody told you to buy a new iPhone, nobody told you to give that expensive gift to your wife, nobody told you to eat healthy, nobody told you to invest smart, nobody told you to build better relationships. It’s all you! You created your own identity. You are the only person who considers yourself a noble person, so you must do noble things. But in reality, you are nobody, and everyone in your life is a stranger to you, contributing to your loneliness.
You’re wasting your time, not your life, by scrolling endlessly on social media. You’re wasting your health, not your life, by not going to the gym. You’re wasting your mental health, not your life, by envying and holding grudges against others. It’s not you who is living—your time, health, or emotions are not your life; they are not you!
What remains when you remove all of that from yourself is ‘You’. If you haven’t understood it yet, here’s an eye-opener: the ‘You’ inside you is just using your soul and body for entertainment. It’s that ‘You’ inside who is creating your life, controlling your thoughts, making you do things, keeping you in those relationships, and making you read this sentence.
In reality, the ‘You’ inside you has no dreams or desires; it only wants to survive and be honest, simple, and joyful. It wants to just flow. But it’s boring for that ‘You’ to live that way—there’s no dopamine involved. The conclusion of your life is simple: the ‘You’ inside just doesn’t want to accept its loneliness. Hence, you are living, just to never feel lonely!
Thanks for reading 🙂
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