A Deeply Lived Life

I’ve spent decades studying human behavior, professionally, personally and in the messy collision between the two, and the longer I do this work, the more I believe that knowing yourself deeply is one of the most valuable things you can pursue in a lifetime.

There is so much of ourselves that we never discover because almost everything about the way we live encourages us to keep moving. We are surrounded by information, opinions, advice, technology and marketing, alongside an endless stream of people telling us what we should want, buy, achieve, improve and become.

And if you are successful, there is another layer to this because there is always more available to you: another opportunity, another revenue target, another experience, another beautiful thing to buy, another place to travel, another way to improve your body, your business, your relationship or yourself.

I love many of these things. I love ambition, money, beautiful things and extraordinary experiences, and I have no interest in pretending that wanting more is somehow shallow or unenlightened.

What I have become increasingly curious about is the relationship we have with more.

When does more genuinely enrich our lives, and when does the pursuit of more become the very thing that prevents us from experiencing the life we already have?

I know this question intimately because I have chased more for much of my life. There was always another level, another achievement, another reinvention, another thing that might finally make me feel as though I had arrived. And yet, almost as soon as you get there, the horizon moves and there is something else to reach for.

I don’t think this is simply about ambition. I believe it is also about how difficult it can be to hear ourselves clearly when our lives are constantly in motion. The faster we move, and the more noise we surround ourselves with, the harder it becomes to distinguish between what we actually want and what we have simply learned to want.

What do I like when nobody is watching? What pace actually suits me? What do I want to give my attention to? What am I doing because it matters to me, and what am I doing because somewhere along the way I decided this was what a successful life was supposed to look like?

These questions require something modern life doesn't particularly encourage: enough space to contemplate, notice and feel something without immediately doing something about it. Enough space to allow an answer to take longer than five fucking minutes to arrive.

Perhaps this is also why I have become less interested in constantly fixing ourselves.

There is an enormous industry built around the idea that we should always be improving. Find the wound, heal the trauma, break the pattern, optimize the body, improve the morning routine, increase the revenue, fix the relationship, become the next version of yourself. There is always somewhere else to get to and something else about ourselves that apparently requires our attention.

But the enquiry at the heart of my work doesn't only reveal our wounds, patterns and unspoken agendas. It can also reveal what has been there all along: our tastes, humor, contradictions and rhythms; the people we feel most ourselves around; the things that give us energy and the things that quietly drain it; the desires that make no sense on paper; the quirks we've edited and the wildness we've contained because somewhere along the way we learned it was safer to be palatable.

None of this disappeared. We simply became extraordinarily good at overriding it.

And perhaps this is where knowing yourself more deeply starts to change the way you live. You become more discerning about what receives your time, energy and attention because you have a clearer sense of what actually matters to you. You don't have to say yes simply because something is a good opportunity, keep accumulating simply because you can afford to, or keep moving simply because stopping feels unfamiliar. You begin to create enough space to hear yourself, trust yourself more and make choices that are increasingly your own.

You also become less inclined to immediately rearrange your business, relationship, home, body or entire life every time discomfort appears. Sometimes the change required is far quieter: to change something small inside yourself instead of constantly rearranging everything outside you.

This is where simplicity has become increasingly interesting to me.

I don't mean deprivation, abandoning ambition or stripping our lives of everything we enjoy. I mean removing some of the unnecessary noise so there is enough space to know what we think before the world tells us what to think, enough silence to notice what our bodies have been trying to tell us, enough patience to wait rather than forcing an answer and enough self-trust to say no without constructing a courtroom defense for why.

And somewhere in creating more space, more of what truly matters becomes available to us.

Deeper connection, intimacy, solitude, community, presence, trust, grace and patience become things we can actually experience rather than ideas we agree are important. We can sit with ourselves without needing to fill every moment, listen to our bodies, walk in nature, reflect, wait and be fully present with another human being without half of our attention already disappearing into whatever comes next.

I don't think this requires us to stop wanting things or become satisfied with whatever we have forever. There will always be things we want to experience, create, build, earn, explore and become curious about. The question I find much more interesting is what we are asking those things to give us, what we have made them mean and whether our relationship with them is allowing us to experience our lives more deeply or keeping us perpetually reaching for somewhere else.

The deeper we know ourselves, the less anything in our lives gets to run us without us knowing why, and the more able we become to decide what actually deserves a place in them.

And perhaps a deeply lived life is not necessarily about having more, doing more or becoming more. Perhaps it is about being able to experience more deeply what is already here.