If you feel lost, write.
Most people mistake noise in their head for thought. If something feels off in your life, you probably haven't written about it yet.
I learned this after six months of what I thought was freedom. Travel, flexibility, no real obligations. But once I took a day to be still, I saw what I'd been missing. I didn't need to escape responsibility, I needed control over my attention.
This distinction matters. We talk a lot about freedom, but not enough about intention. The world seems to be splitting into those who write (and think) and those who don't. I was close to becoming one of the latter.
It's easy to drift into a passive state, especially when everything around you is optimised for distraction. To escape that, you have to act deliberately. Clear thinking isn't automatic. In fact, the more capable you are, the easier it is to waste that potential chasing the wrong things. Potency without clarity is dangerous.
One way to get clarity is to shift mental modes from reacting to reflecting. Most people operate on autopilot. But if you take time to really examine what you're doing and why, you might realise you don't actually want what you're chasing.
Trying things helps, but it often ends up akin to throwing darts blindfolded if not paired with introspection. You can do anything, but not everything. At some point, you have to stop and ask what's actually worth doing instead of just staying busy.
What surprised me wasn’t that freedom fell short, but how quietly it did so. There was no crash or notable breaking point. Just a slow fading of what I could only describe as purpose. The more options I had, the less any of them seemed to matter. It occurred to me that direction may play a bigger part than variety in feeling alive.
Having mistaken the byproduct—happiness—for the source, I realised the real question isn’t “How can I have everything?” It’s “Am I doing the one thing that matters most to me right now?” That answer won’t come through ephemeral deliberation. You have to write it down.