Fear of Living

Are you living or are you hiding from life?

We are so afraid of any struggle in life, so we stop living altogether.

Maybe you are expecting a talk about not following your dreams, but we don’t need to go that far to show how we are trying to avoid living. It is easy to see our escapism in our small and not-so-significant moments.

Slowly we are becoming numb and unbearable to our own lives. But it’s very subtle, so it’s hard to see it and that is the whole point of those actions: Not allowing yourself to see you have a life to live.

Our lives are like the life of a leaf in the sea.

Yes, there is some movement, some road ahead of us, and some shiny-looking destinations to go to, but we don’t see we are just dragged along the waves. Petrified and unable to stretch our arms to swim in any other direction.

Just don’t look

It has become so hard to stand by ourselves for even 30 seconds, so we take our phones with us while peeing. It is impossible to eat without watching something. Our plans consist of only pleasure-seeking. Forget allowing yourself to have a hard time, even doing something that is not pleasurable has become impossible. Boring is scary, not keeping ourselves busy and dealing with ourselves is scarier.

Therefore, just laying on the waves is so much easier and so much safer. We don’t need to look around and scare ourselves of the possibility of unknown waters. Just keep yourself busy. If your current activities are not enough to keep your head down, find bigger and better distractions.

What if I drown?

Are you breathing now that you are afraid of drowning?

Our bodies are burning from the inside to do more, to swim to unique places, to draw our own paths. But instead, we respond to this fire by thinking we need to get cooler. So we put our heads in the water (also hiding on the inside). Or we think that we need to get better and faster on the path waves set for us, so we increase our speed.

If your life lacks meaning in a seemingly satisfying situation with enough money, a good job, a good social environment (and whatever metric there is to measure success), the answer to change is unlikely to be more pleasure-seeking (aka keeping your head in the water) or having a higher paying job with a more prestigious title (aka increasing your speed).

A life dedicated to avoiding failures

Do you know what is more powerful than failure?

Fear of failure.

People think if we prepare ourselves enough and have some successes on our backs, we will be more confident and braver. That is not exactly true. Do you know who is not afraid? Those who fail multiple times and see they survive, those who become no longer afraid of failing.

Instead of fearing to fail, just fail.

It is much more freeing. At least you’ll have more experience and more idea about why you failed and how can you improve next time.

So what are you waiting for, time to swim!

Just keep in mind that you are still in the sea, and start drawing your path with the support of the waves. You don’t need to drop everything and start to swim exactly against the waves. Even if your aim is the exact opposite direction, full turns take time.

But it all starts with pulling your head out of the water to look around and using your arms.

To the oceans my friend!