Why You Feel Like You’re Not Driving Your Own Life

Alright, and welcome back. So today I want to talk about a specific guy. And the tricky part is this guy almost never knows this episode is about him. Because if I asked him how he's doing, he'd say, fine. Job's fine, family's fine, health's, you know, fine. Nothing's on fire, nobody's dying. And yet there's a low hum of disaffection under his life. Sunday night comes and there's a dread he can't attach to anything. He's busy all week, every week, and none of it seems to add up to anything. And so he catches himself scrolling at 11pm Looking for something, but he couldn't tell you what. And then he keeps saying, well, tomorrow is the day I'll. Tomorrow is the day I'll get back in the gym. Tomorrow is the day I'll start the thing, Tomorrow's the day I'll make the call. And that constant low grade self questioning is always running in the background, right? Is this the right job? Should we move? Is this the right relationship? Is this it? And so again, if you asked him what's wrong, he'd say, you know, I'm just in a rut, things are okay, or it's just a busy season, or man, I don't know, I'm just tired. I'll tell you what I'd call it. He's lost his direction. And I can say that with some tenderness because the most painful stretches of my own life were exactly this. I was stuck doing work I didn't want to do. And the worst part was that the part that actually hurt the most was that I didn't even know where I wanted to be going instead. So I was just grinding on the hamster wheel. Yet the wheel wasn't adding up to anything, right? So there was nothing on the other side of the effort. That's a particular kind of pain for us as men. And most of us have no name for it. So we call it stress or a rut, or we don't call it anything and just, you know, pour another drink. And first I just want to take the shame off this right away. Because losing our direction is close to inevitable. The way our lives are often set up as men, we get handed a track, right? School, then maybe some more school, then a career, then a partner, then a mortgage, maybe kids. And here's the thing, the track, the script, the escalator, it gives you the feeling of direction for free for years. You always know the next thing because the next thing is printed right on that track. But then somewhere, often in your 30s or 40s, the track just kind of ends. You've been doing the things, and suddenly nobody hands you the next one. Now, most men don't face this until life interrupts them. The midlife crisis, the health scare, the kids moving out, the relationship ending. The track ends. And suddenly a man who's been moving his whole life realizes he has no idea which way he's actually pointed. So that's the guy I'm talking to today. And what I want to give you is what direction actually is, why your system suffers so much without it, and frankly, how men have found it for thousands of years. Because the method is old and it still works. So here's the picture I always come back to, right? You're in a boat on the ocean. And there are two ways to be in that boat. You can have your hands on the oars, rowing towards something you've chosen, or you can just be sitting in it, adrift, while the ocean tosses you wherever it wants. Same boat, same ocean, completely different men. And the thing about drifting is it actually feels busy. That's what fools us. The drifting man is still having to bail water, sometimes adjusting to every wave, reacting to every little fire in his inbox and his household, trying to predict what's going to happen next. And in a lot of ways, he's exhausted, but he looks productive. Life is happening to him all day long. And a man rowing even slowly, even against the weather, that man is in a different state entirely because he's happening to life. One of the men who came through my work put it this way, and it's really stayed with me. I stopped feeling like I was driving the car of my life. That's it. That's the feeling. The engine's running, the car is moving, and you're somehow not the one driving it. So now, again, let me tell you what direction is, because most men hear it, and they immediately reach for the wrong thing. They think direction means the magic job, the purpose with a capital P, the one that pays great and saves the world and makes your dad proud. And if. If they can't find that perfect unicorn, they conclude they have no purpose, and they just kind of go back to the couch and fall back into the rut. But here's the real thing. Direction is a horizon. And a horizon is a different animal than a goal. You never arrive at a horizon. You aim at it and you move. And the moving is. Is the whole game, right? I've watched a man orient his entire life around being the Best father that ever lived. Technically impossible, and yet it organized everything. How he worked, how he slept, who he spent time with. I also know guys whose horizon is catching the perfect wave. And their whole life is about being in real relationship with the ocean because of it. Nobody would put either of those on a resume necessarily. Right. But both of those men know exactly which way they're pointed. And I want you to get why this matters at the level of your actual health as a man, because this goes way past feeling a little flat. Men and the masculine suffer when we don't have a sense of direction. I mean, measurably. Now, a similar example to this, just to put a pin in it, my grandmother lived to 96 and she got up every single day to help my dad in his florist shop. When the florist closed, she was gone. Within about six months, she was complete. Why? There was nothing left to get up for. That's how load bearing direction is in a human being. And so what I'm saying here is, I'd argue for men and the masculine, it's even more so. Here's the other thing that happens without it. All that life energy that's supposed to be moving you somewhere, it doesn't just evaporate, it goes up into your head and spins. Is this the right job? Should I have taken the other offer? Is this the right city, the right plan, the right life? That endless loop of self questioning, that's the rudderlessness. That's what drifting feels like from the inside. And I said this for years about thought loops. Most thoughts exist to keep you exactly where you are. The spin is never about taking you anywhere. Holding you in place safely is often its whole function. Now though, compare the energy of that to a man who says, this is what I'm trying right now. Here's the current plan, here's how I'm adjusting it. He fails plenty. But then he tweaks the plan and still nothing's guaranteed. But there's motion with intention behind it. And you can feel the difference in a man like that from across the room. Direction is just magnetic like that to everyone around a person, embodying it, even long before it's certain and long before it succeeds. I did a whole episode on this a while back that relates called the difference between waiting and resting. Resting as consciousness, which is a phrase I originally got from one of my teachers, is a powerful practice and it's intentional. Waiting is actually what most drifting men are actually doing. They're waiting for clarity to arrive. They're waiting for the sign. Waiting for permission. Waiting to feel ready. It looks patient, but often it's just paralysis. With good posture, resting is different. Resting is very present and alive. And when an impulse arises, you trust yourself and act in accordance with it. The drifting man says, I'll move when I know. And the truth, it runs the other way. Often you come to know by first moving, which really ends up raising the obvious question. If you can't wait your way to direction, and you can't think your way there either, how do we as men actually find it? And so I want to give you the two compasses I've watched actually work in my life and in the hundreds of men I've worked with. And fair warning, neither of them lives on a whiteboard. Both of them live in your body. The first compass is energy. Let me tell you how I learned this one, because I learned it the embarrassing way. In my late 20s, I moved to LA to chase filmmaking, which sounds like direction, right? Big dream, bold move. But I left behind the structure that had been holding me. My men, my practices. And I went all in on the chase. And frankly, I drifted for two or three years inside my own dream. I was overweight, overweight from eating crafty food on sets. I wasn't taking care of myself, working out, sleeping well. And I was further from myself every month while technically pursuing my passion. That's a version of Lost that often nobody warns you about. You can be sprinting down a track and still be adrift because the track was never actually checked against your own life. But here's the deal. Years later, I was doing tech and coding work to pay the bills, and I started noticing something dead simple. I'd finish a day at the computer, and I'd feel awful, drained in my head flat. And then I'd spend two hours in circle with my men, right? And I'd walk out going, fuck, yeah, let's do this. Full of energy I didn't have when I walked in. And one day, the question just landed. What if I could get paid to do the thing that brings me energy instead of the thing that extracts it from me? And as I started to follow that energy, that question became my career. That question became this podcast you're listening to right now. Your energy is already voting every day, all day. Some things in your life fill you and some things drain you. And most men never once sit down and really read that tally. And here's the catch. Underneath the catch, you can only read that tally if you can feel it. A man who's numb who lives from the neck up, who's been running on coffee and willpower for a decade. He's got no signal to read. The data's there, but the instrument is offline. That's why presence work. Actually landing in your body comes before purpose work every time. You get present first and then what feeds you starts registering. That is compass one. The second compass is motion, right? And here's something I believe about the wandering years most men are ashamed of. You can't truly know your purpose until you know yourself. And you can't know yourself till you've tried some shit. Alison Armstrong calls this the night phase. I mean, really tried it, right? Gone deep, played full out, and then moved on when the energy left. In case you think I'm speaking theoretically, let me give you my actual resume, right? I've been a cashier. I've washed cars. I've worked at a gym, I worked at a bowling alley. I ran an event center. I did tech support for an online college. I spent two years as a caregiver for teenagers with autism. I moved to LA and worked on film and TV and wrote and directed my own films and shows. I ran a web dev company that is just one man's list. Brothers. And, you know, frankly, I could keep going. But what I found was not one of those was my purpose. But not one of them was wasted because every single one taught me something about myself. What drains me, what feeds me, what can I endure? And what do I refuse to go back to? And when I finally looked back across all of it, there was a thread running through everything I loved. Connection, waking people up. Creation. The thread often only becomes visible in the rear view mirror, which means trying things is the finding. There's no version where you figure out the destination first and and then start walking. The man waiting to know before he moves has it exactly backwards. And the man, three jobs into his search is often closer than he thinks. And frankly, this all connects to. There's one more place to look, and it's the last place any of us wants to. It's in your pain. In your deepest pain will often lie the clues to your deepest purpose. The thing you had to survive as a boy. The thing you've spent your whole adult life managing. Oftentimes, that stuff is usually pointing straight at the way you're meant to serve because you've walked the road they're standing at the start of. I'm a living example of this. I grew up in a family with no emotional connection. A lonely kid who spent his teens and most of his 20s, not knowing how to connect and reach people. And look at the thread that showed up across all those jobs. Connection. My purpose grew straight out of my wound. That's what shadow work actually is, by the way. It's going into the rooms in yourself you sealed off years ago because the clues are locked in there with the pain. The parts of your story you're most ashamed of are load bearing for the direction you're looking for. And so if you're sitting there thinking, but yeah, Jason, I don't even know what to aim at, then hear this one, because it changed things for a bunch of my guys. It's really simple. If you don't know your purpose, your purpose is to find your fucking purpose. That's it. That's a real heading. Starting tonight, a man in search is no longer adrift. Start trying. Shit. And one more piece here for the men who want a horizon worth aiming at. Make it too big to ever finish and reach. I mean that seriously. The one I've landed on for my own life is to train a billion warriors of the heart. A billion? Can't be done. And as I start to execute that, the manifestation. How do I do that? Every man should be in a men's group. The theme of this company, evolutionary men. But here's the deal. It's too big for one person. But that's the point when the aim is impossible. But the whole am I winning or losing Hamster wheel shuts off and only one question remains. Am I moving toward it? Best father who ever lived works the exact same way. So does ending loneliness. So pick a horizon you can walk toward for the rest of your life and never actually get there. So those are the compasses, right? Energy and motion. And here's the catch with both of them. Again, you cannot read a compass at highway speed. No podcast or book is going to hand you your heading. And neither is ding, ding, ding, your LLM, whether it's chat, Claude, Gemini, you name it. Direction rises from a quieter place. And the noise of your normal life is often exactly what's drowning it out. The hamster wheel that erased your direction cannot be the place you go to to recover it. And what actually works is old men. And people have been doing it for thousands of years. You leave. You get away from the village, from your home, away from the Rolls, away from everyone who needs you to keep being who you've been. You go out into nature. You strip away the distractions, and you sit with the big questions until something in you moves and answers. Why Am I here? What am I moving towards? What do I do next? It's uncomfortable, honestly, because with the distractions gone, there's nothing between you and the question. And that's exactly why it works. So many cultures we know of had some version of this, particularly for its men, ours, our modern Western culture. It's just forgot. So here's your free version, and I'm going to encourage you to actually do it this week. One hour phone stays home. And I mean home. Not in your pocket, not on silent, not on airplane mode. Get somewhere with the sky, trail or a park at dawn and walk or sit with one question, what am I moving toward? And remember the distinction from earlier, because this hour is where it becomes real. You're not out there waiting, arms crossed, for an answer to fall out of the sky. You're resting, very present in your body, tuned into the environment, and you're actively listening for an impulse, a tension that wants to come to completion. And when something rises, a pole, an image, a name, a next step, your job is to trust it enough to move on it. Don't force an answer, though. Let the question work on you. If nothing comes, you still just gave your system maybe its first hour of quiet in months. And I bet money something starts surfacing in the days after the men I know who've rebuilt their direction all started with some version of that hour. And if you want the full strength version of this, the real one, this is why I run retreats. Not going to pitch you too much. I'm just going to say this. Labor Day weekend, September 3rd through 7th, our men's retreat in Bell Valley in Mendocino in Northern California. You're going to get four days away from every role you play. It's out near the redwoods. It's very quiet. We're going to do a lot of deep practice. And there's going to be a circle of men holding the same inquiry. Where am I going? Because doing this next to other men often takes it somewhere. Solitude, alone. Can't we cap it at 26 men? And as of tonight, there's. There's just five spots left. Lodging and meals are handled. You just gotta get yourself there. Link's in the show notes. It's evolutionary min retreat. I do it every year. And if the timing's wrong, take the hour this week seriously. But if you heard the drifting man described tonight, felt your own chest, you know, tighten up that recognition. It's worth trusting. So let me land this where we started. You don't need the whole map of your life. Nobody has the whole map. You just need a heading and a hand. Right back on the oars. Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going? The three questions I say every man has to be able to answer. And no one can answer them for you, right? What are you moving towards? What's your horizon? Hope to see some of you in California until next time.