Why It Feels Like Something Is Missing From Life

Is something missing from your life? Some undefined hole that simply can’t be filled? Perhaps it a bug of our society. A structural fault caused by the interplay between goals, technology, geography, values and opulence.

If left unchallenged, these influences can produce a feeling of a lacking something of meaning, connection, identity and purpose.

This podcast begins with a reading of a poem ‘Why’. From there I discuss this feeling of lack, and how to combat it.

Transcript

Welcome to the Reality Check Podcast.

I'm Zachary Phillips.

Why?

Why does it feel like I'm all alone?

Like my house isn't my home?

Like I'm running from the unknown?

Why does it feel like it shouldn't be this way?

Like my nerves are on display?

Like I'm living like prey?

Why does it feel like my mind's full of trash?

Like my intentions are ash?

Like I'm hoarding my father's stash?

Why does it feel like I'm under attack?

Like my intentions lack?

Like I'm waiting for a smack?

Why does it feel like it will never end?

Like my words offend?

Like I'm expected to pretend?

Why does it feel like everyone is lying?

Like my dreams are dying?

Like I'm only supported when crying?

Why does it feel like these words aren't enough?

Like my life isn't so rough?

Like I'm creating demons from fluff?

Why does it feel like I'm a total fraud?

Like my soul just wants you to applaud?

Like I'm fundamentally flawed?

Why?

I have to say that the modern western society seems to lack something fundamental.

There seems to be something missing.

And there's something that's missing,

Expresses itself,

And results in a lot of distress and negative symptoms for both the individual and the society at large.

I think it's the cause of the mental health crisis,

The cause of a lot of our issues with self-harm and addiction and suicide.

I think it's the cause of,

Or maybe not the cause,

But a contributing factor to these things.

To relationship breakdown,

To the midlife crisis,

To just that general feeling of malaise that you only seem to be able to fulfil with yet another purchase.

With yet another post on social media.

With yet another action taken without thought.

It seems to be the reason why,

Or a cause of,

Or a contributing factor to why we hate our work life.

Why life just feels like an endless drag.

While things seem inherently pointless.

I think this is because we inherently have a lack of meaning,

A lack of connection,

A lack of shared identity.

Meaning,

Identity,

Connection,

Purpose.

And it expresses itself in multiple ways.

The impetus for this podcast was a post,

And I've seen this expressed in multiple places,

But it reminded me.

And the idea was that if you look back over the past,

And you can break the past into different decades or epochs.

You know,

The sixties has a distinct taste and flair and sort of personality.

The fifties feel a bit different.

The forties feel different.

The seventies feel different,

Right?

The early 1990s feel different.

Even the early 2000s feel a bit different.

Because there was either significant events,

Or significant things,

Or significant cultural movements.

And you go back further and you can see that sort of identity to different ages or different epochs,

Different groups,

Different movements.

And obviously,

The further back you go,

The more it gets clouded by the fog of time.

But the post was highlighting that,

You know,

For the last ten to twenty years,

Maybe since,

You know,

9-11,

It's like we don't have an identity.

It's just things are just getting louder and angrier and more compounded.

There's no sort of identity of the 2010s.

Whereas you look back over all of the previous decades and you can see clear,

Clear distinctions.

Our age,

Now,

Doesn't seem to have it.

And that causes people a lot of distress.

And I'm going to tie this back to the meaning and the connection and the purpose and all of this sort of stuff.

But let's dwell here for a little bit.

There's a couple of things at play.

I think the rise of social media and technology and extreme globalization and capitalism all are putting into this effect that we can access media and sort of groups in a way that we never were able to in the past.

You know,

You're listening to my voice now.

But the problem with that,

Not the problem,

A feature of that is that what you are exposed to,

You're listening to this podcast right now.

But there's endless amounts of other podcasts that other people are listening to.

And they're sort of jumping into their own echo chambers.

You're in this echo chamber there and that echo chamber.

So if you're listening to me,

You'll be listening to similar things to me because it appeals to you.

And that makes sense.

Whereas in the past,

There was limited forms of entertainment and education and voices.

So you found that society had a sort of a single lens or only a few lenses to view regality through.

But because we can now really siloed ourself with our information input,

With our entertainment,

It's really rare that you will find this cross-cultural connection.

You'll connect to very,

Very small amounts of people.

But on the whole,

It's very disparate.

I'm 33 years old now and I haven't been a teacher for the last couple of years,

But I was a high school teacher for 10 years.

And even in that 10-year span,

I saw the impact of music.

And when I was first starting to teach,

There was still sort of quote-unquote popular music and mainstream music.

And don't get me wrong,

There still is mainstream music,

But it really is starting to diversify and die out.

You still get a few megastars,

But more and more and more,

I was seeing the kids and just checking out their music and be like,

Okay,

What you're listening to?

And they'll show me this obscure artist that I've never heard of.

And that I'll take it to another kid in that same school and that kid has never heard of that artist.

But you go on their page and they've got millions of followers and millions of views.

So this artist is legit,

Right?

They're making awesome music.

But it wasn't the same as when I was in school when there was the people that listen to old rock or rap or pop or whatever it was that you could see be like,

Yeah,

Well,

I'm into pop.

And then you'd like that whole sort of genre.

It's so much more diversified,

So much more siloed.

And now that same thing is applied to entertainment.

Think about the amount of media that is coming out by the big names like your Netflix and Amazons and all those people.

But then also extrapolate that to your podcasts,

To your YouTube skits,

To TikTok.

You could spend all of your,

What I would have called TV time,

But now it's obviously taking place on devices and other places.

But you could spend all of your time just on random YouTubers or TikTokers and never,

Ever consume something that someone else is consuming.

And that's great because you get to a unique,

Personalized,

Awesome experience.

It's lovely on one sense,

And you do get a deep connection to that community.

But it's an online community that doesn't exist in your physical space.

So when you interact with other people,

It's like,

Oh,

Hey,

Have you seen this guy?

Have you heard this guy?

And it's hard to connect with people because they're all consuming things that are down their own paths.

This is added to with the advertisements that you get on your phone,

No matter what website you're on,

Or social media,

YouTube,

All of that sort of stuff.

The advertisements are curated,

Are chosen for you based on your past purchasing history,

Based on your viewing experiences,

Based on your demographics.

They're algorithmically being fed to you,

And the ad creators can target who they want to target.

So I could be looking at my phone,

You could be looking at your phone.

We could both be watching the same video.

We could both be watching the same content,

Engaging with it in the same way,

But we'd be getting advertised differently.

So what all of this does is leads to a completely different experience of reality.

We see the impact of that now,

Particularly with all of the stuff that's happening in the world.

It's very hard to have a common narrative.

We're all just sort of screaming at each other because we know that our opinion is our opinion.

We know that there's a bunch of people,

Often online,

That completely agree with us,

And it's very hard to even find or be exposed to the other side.

A little bit of a tangent here,

But I'm getting into breathwork.

I really appreciate it as a meditation and this sort of stuff.

But even trying to find the name of the thing to start searching for is a challenge.

If you're like,

I tried this breathwork thing.

How do you get into that community?

How do you get into that field?

You have to sort of be exposed to it in order to understand even how to find more information on it.

There's a gap there.

For me to work out,

Okay,

Who's legit in the breathworking field?

What are the best resources?

How can I find this information out?

I have to know about,

For example,

Subreddits.

I can look around the subreddit of that community.

I need to know about Facebook groups.

I need to engage with people that are already engaged with it.

But let's say I didn't have access to that knowledge or I didn't know of those resources.

There's a chance that I would just simply wouldn't be able to find the information.

I know that that has happened to me for a bunch of stuff.

I just didn't know where to even start.

My curiosity was blocked.

Then it's all too easy to fall back into just watching the same sort of shows over and over again.

New content because people are incentivized to release the new content,

But we're all incentivized to have it the same.

With the stuff I do online,

I'm quite diverse and that comes at a cost.

It comes at a cost to me because you'll get this sort of content from me.

Then my next podcast that I'm going to post will be about an erotic fiction book that I wrote,

Which is what's coming next on the Reality Check podcast.

It could be about a web comic.

It could be about meditation.

It could be about a 75-hour challenge.

It could be about poetry.

It could be about whatever.

It could be a podcast about a comedy about Russia that I do with my wife,

The Motherland podcast.

I'm quite varied in the content that I put out there.

That comes at a cost because people aren't getting a combined or a consistent experience.

Each of those avenues are consistent,

But me as a whole is quite diverse down a few different paths.

Whereas,

Back to the breathing example,

I'll look online and I'll find a few people and you go to their website and it's just like they're doing breathing.

That's what they're doing.

That's what they're selling.

That's what you get.

It's great if that's what you want,

But it's on my perspective,

I just can't be that person.

People get me in the entirety of me,

For better or worse.

But enough on that tangent.

If we go back to this idea of different silos,

We rarely have a collective society-based global experience.

Even with a pandemic or any of that sort of stuff,

It's still experienced through these different silos and that makes it hard to connect,

To connect to society as a large.

Now don't get me wrong.

You look back to the 60s,

There was the typical cliche that you get from the 60s,

But there was also the other side of that.

But there was less,

Or at least it feels like,

This is all my interpretation as well.

Maybe it's just a feeling.

Maybe I'm wrong.

But it just seems like there was less diversity of experience.

You could push back.

You could be counterculture.

You could do all of those things,

But it just seems like there was more cohesion.

Whether or not you were,

If you were against,

For example,

The Vietnam War,

Then there's a massive group of people with you alongside.

It's sort of clear.

Whereas if that was to happen today,

Which it did with the Afghan stuff,

It wasn't as clear.

There was a lot of disparate and different voices screaming at each other while people are suffering.

So I fear that.

I don't know.

It makes me concerned.

But we can take this lack of meaning to a deeper level,

To a different level,

Sorry.

There's no real rites of passage.

There's no real rites of passage in our society.

So yeah,

Like you get to be a certain age and then you can drink and you can drive and you can do all of those things.

But you don't have to do anything to earn it.

You don't have to do anything to be considered an adult other than just live for long enough.

Whereas if you look back to tribal societies,

They had a lot of,

It seems like all of them,

Had their own sort of initiation rites.

You had to go through something painful,

Something challenging,

Something beneficial to the society.

You had to prove your worth in some capacity.

And on one hand,

It's like,

Well,

You know,

You shouldn't have to prove your worth.

Everyone's worthwhile,

All of that sort of stuff.

And I get it from a mental health perspective in one sense,

But in a deeper sense,

If you bought into the society that,

You know,

This is what society values,

This is what it constitutes a worthy man or woman or person or whatever.

And to be accepted,

You know,

We've all gone through this.

You're going to go through it too.

And that's what will make you a man.

That's what will make you a woman.

That's what will make you an elder,

Right?

There's something to be said for that.

You know,

And I don't speak from my perspective,

But from a male's perspective,

There's this desire to sort of prove yourself.

So how do we end up proving ourselves?

Well,

Then it becomes this peer group thing of men,

Of young boys trying to lead young boys to become men that they don't really know what the goal is,

Right?

A lot of boys have been raised by single parents,

Single mothers like I was.

We lacked a male role model that was showing us,

Teaching us,

Guiding us.

So we could only turn to people online,

People above us in a social hierarchy,

People that we saw on TVs or movies.

You know,

Things that aren't necessarily grounded in reality even.

So you want to sort of prove yourself,

I'm brave,

I can do this.

It leads to crime,

It leads to violence,

It leads to a whole variety of social issues.

Whereas if we had a more connected society that was like,

This is what it means to,

This is how you do become an adult,

This is a rites of passage sort of thing,

Maybe that would produce less issues.

I'm not sure the reality of that,

But it seems to be backed up by some anecdotal evidence.

And if you look to the mental health outcomes of tribal nations or people that have gone through conflict issues collectively,

There seems to be better outcomes.

There's an amazing book called Tribes by Sebastian Junga,

And he's a war correspondent,

A reporter,

And he talks about the issues of PTSD and self-harm and suicide in general Western communities when compared to tribal societies and people in groups under conflict and under mass issues,

The societal-based life circumstances.

He made some interesting points saying that there are more issues in a safe Western society for a bunch of reasons.

There aren't a rite of passage,

There's a disconnection between groups.

Someone can work a job that doesn't really seem to connect to the functioning of society.

There's just a lack of connection there.

Whereas if you have a rite of passage that everyone goes through,

You feel connected.

Whereas if you go off to fight and you're protecting your homeland from the invaders,

Like you're all there together doing something that you can definitely see a direct connection to.

There seems to be more of a meaning.

You did something,

And if you suffer a loss or death or disability disfigurement,

Whatever,

There is more of a meaning behind that than if you were to fight a distant war or just go through the modernity of life creating widgets for a capitalist society that you know in your soul isn't necessarily needed for survival.

It's just another thing.

You're just ticking that box to get the paycheck to survive another day to go through it again.

Look,

I don't know the answers to this.

I'm just sort of see.

I feel like a lot of the stuff that I talk about on this podcast and talk about in general is like,

Hey,

Here's a problem.

Deal?

But then obviously I am facing and dealing with these issues myself.

So how do I overcome and how do I deal with it?

How do I manage this lack of feeling and meaning and connection,

This lack of rites of passage,

This lack of connection to a wider community,

The siloing,

All of that sort of stuff?

Couple of things.

I believe in sport and martial arts and that sort of challenge.

It's not a comparison,

But I've gotten my way up to a black singlet in Muay Thai and a few other martial arts.

I'm currently training jiu-jitsu.

So I've been doing it for a while and there's grading and there's ranks and there's competitions.

So it's like you can pit yourself against other people.

And yeah,

I want to win,

But it's more I just want to complete that challenge.

I want to be graded by an external source that I value.

The gym that I train at is quite strict in its grading hierarchy.

It takes a long time and were I training somewhere else,

I would be a higher rank.

But I know that when I attain the next belt,

I've most certainly earned it and I can wear it with pride.

And I know in my soul,

In my heart,

That I've done the thing and I've been rewarded.

Now on one level,

On the level that we're talking about on this podcast,

That's amazing.

Obviously on another level,

We don't want to be training just for that sort of external reward.

It's like I'm not training to get the belt,

But the belt will come and it will confirm something.

So it's sort of like a jewel,

Maybe somewhat hypocritical or sort of diametrically opposed meanings.

But there is something to be said there.

You train daily for the connection,

For the growth,

For the self-defense,

For the physicality.

And when the recognition comes,

You know you've earned it and that has a different sort of feeling of joy and connection.

But if it doesn't come,

That's okay too because you still just keep going.

So I'll suggest that finding some sort of external community to connect with,

To work towards,

Have a goal.

Have a goal that is tied to an external community.

Something that you can't control.

I can say,

And I do,

I want to get eventually a million book sales.

Sounds out language,

Sounds extreme,

But ultimately that's only tied to myself.

I could get to 100,

000 and I could be like,

Oh,

That's good enough.

I could get to 2 million and be like,

No,

I'm still not satisfied.

But I can't control the opinion on someone else when they think I'm worthy,

When the community thinks I'm worthy.

That's a different experience.

So I strongly suggest you find something like that.

But obviously be aware that when you're falling in with a community that has a leader or that's an external community that you're not getting into some sort of weird guru slash cult leader sort of situation.

Just that sort of little tinge of a little warning there.

Just be careful.

But in general,

You can find,

Trust your instincts,

All that sort of good stuff.

I'd also suggest finding and connecting to yourself as honestly as possible.

So although we do live in a siloed society,

It'd be very good to make sure you're connecting to the right silos and expressing that.

So that's what I try to do is the more I know myself,

The more I know what I'm looking into now,

Like the breath work.

So introspect,

Take times to meditate and then consider what you truly like and be willing to make,

You know,

Try a few things and change.

But when you do,

When you do find a community,

Go into it hard,

Enjoy it,

Embrace it,

Live it,

Live it,

You know.

And finally,

As always,

I push writing therapy.

I started the,

I'm going to start the end in the podcasts with poetry if they fit and this poem,

Why.

Sort of feels,

Sort of expresses this connection community,

Sort of feel that I'm trying to sort of overcome.

And it's like,

Well,

Hey,

This is how I feel about it.

And it's always good to be able to express those feelings because the only way you can really accept and move on and sort of deal with the feelings is by understanding them appropriately.

You can find that understanding through meditation.

You can also find it through writing therapy.

So like I said,

Give that a try.

I'm going to end the podcast with,

I'll reread that poem,

Why,

To you.

But I just want to highlight,

You can see this podcast on Amazon,

Audible.

You can find it on iTunes or on Spotify,

All those places if you want to check out all the other stuff I'm going on.

And if you do like it,

Please just chuck us a review.

It really does help.

It only takes you about 10 to 90 seconds,

But it makes me feel good.

It lets me know what you're enjoying and it helps spread the word.

So if you think someone needs to see this podcast,

Give it a review,

Share it and yeah,

Let me know how you're feeling because it makes a massive difference.

Anyway,

With that said,

Why?

Why does it feel like I'm all alone?

Like my house isn't my home?

Like I'm running from the unknown?

Why does it feel like it shouldn't be this way?

Like my nerves are on display?

Like I'm living as prey?

Why does it feel like my mind's full of trash?

Like my intentions are ash?

Like I'm holding my father's stash?

Why does it feel like I'm under attack?

Like my intentions lack?

Like I'm waiting for a smack?

Why does it feel like it will never end?

Like my words offend?

Like I'm expected to pretend?

Why does it feel like everyone is lying?

Like my dreams are dying?

Like I'm only supported when crying?

Why does it feel like these words aren't enough?

Like my life isn't so rough?

Like I'm creating demons from fluff?

Why does it feel like I'm a total fraud?

Like my soul just wants you to applaud?

Like I'm fundamentally flawed?

Why?

Thanks for listening.

Reviews

This dude is like 33 and has the wisdom of a 93 year old.

Thank you for being you. My Higher Power leads me to listen to just what I need in the moment. Today, this was it. Also a great reminder to return to writing therapy.