How do you truly feel now?

“The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.”  -Norman Cousins

Hey y’all,

In my first "content" post, I would love to explore a topic that I am deeply passionate about- Happiness.

While I was traveling in Puerto Rico & Dominican Republic in December 2021 with one of my best friends, we spent a lot of time reflecting on our current state of life.

In one of our conversations, my friend made an observation that caught me by surprise:

"Hey Jamie, it looks like you got a nice job, a decent apartment, and a good group of friends surrounding you. You must be living your best life after moving to NYC."

From the outside, it looks like I have my shit together. I moved to NYC about six months ago and live in a cozy studio in downtown Manhattan. I have a comfortable tech job with a decent work-life balance. Fortunately, I am also surrounded by two of my best friends and a group of college friends, who I got a lot closer after moving to the city.

However, deep down inside, I know I am not truly satisfied with my life right now. It’s a strange feeling: I am not unhappy about my life, but I am also not super passionate about my current state of life. It’s a feeling of I am just going through every day for the sake of passing time.

Digging deeper into the root causes of why I am feeling this way, I had two observations:

I feel like I am not learning and growing at the pace I want

At work, I am not stepping out of my comfort zone. I am still in the sales operations role doing similar things to what I was doing in the past two years. Although I am providing a lot of value through my work, I am not learning anything drastically new.

I feel like I am just cashing out the deposit that I put in from my previous two jobs. If I don’t do anything about it now, I fear I will eventually use up everything I learned before and become obsolete.

Outside of work, I mostly spend my time watching Youtube videos about Kdrama summary and playing computer games with friends. Although there’s nothing wrong with having some time for entertainment every day, I feel like I was spending way TOO MUCH time watching videos or playing games.

Every Friday & Saturday night, I would play games with friends till 3:00 am and then wake up at 1 pm the next day. It's okay to do this once in a while, but I feel guilty for doing this every weekend. It’s kinda like eating junk food: you feel great while eating, but you feel like shit afterwards.

I feel like I am not making any progress towards realizing my “destiny”

Just like the quote from The Alchemist (this is one of my favorite books of all time and I will write about it in one of my future blog posts):

“To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation.” -Paulo Coelho

I believe that everyone is born for a reason: everyone has his or her dream to fulfill.

Although I still don't exactly know what my "destiny" is, I know one of my goals in life is to start my own business one day. I have been telling friends and family about this aspiration for at least the past ten years, but I barely did anything about it. I am always beating around the bush by convincing myself that working at a startup is similar to starting a business. However, I know there's still a big difference between starting your own thing versus working at a startup.

Whether it is I am too busy settling down in NYC or I don't have a co-founder, I am always giving myself different excuses to not work on my goal. There are so many things I could be doing to start my own business. Still, I am always too "busy" indulging myself with the instant gratification of watching videos or playing games mindlessly.

Although it's difficult for me to admit that I am not entirely content with my life, I think it's crucial to acknowledge how I feel about my life. After when I surface the reasons for my dissatisfaction in life, I am finally able to have some clarity around what are some things I need to change about my life:

To start learning new things:

At work, I need to change my role & responsibility. Fortunately, I recently transitioned into the go-to-market strategy team at my current company. Instead of aligning myself to a specific sales team, I am now being exposed to various challenging projects across different teams to force me to continue to grow.

Outside of work, instead of gaming every day, I am starting to attend some magic lectures and develop a new routine to perform. Performing magic has always been my passion for the past ten years, but I have not been improving my magic in the past few years. It's refreshing for me to start learning new magic again, and I can't wait to share my new performance with y'all soon!

To start making progress towards realizing my "destiny"

Although I still have no clue how to start my business, I know I need to start creating value. As mentioned in my previous post about why I am starting a blog, I think sharing my blog posts about my reflections and learnings is the easiest way to start adding value to everyone's life.

Writing about my blog post every day really gives me a sense of progress and a clear goal to work towards. I will try my best to post at least once every two weeks, so please hold me accountable!

At the end of the day, I don’t know if all the adjustments I am making now will solve all my problems, but I think at least it’s a start. I see this as an iterative process and continuous self-exploration.

Conclusion

As we are going through life, it's so easy to choose to sweep any uneasiness we feel under the rug and pretend everything is going great. In my case, I chose to ignore the guilt I feel from not learning constantly and being addicted to video games. As a result, I end up slowly losing my passion and feeling something is missing from my life. I think one of the simplest things we can start doing to improve our happiness is: to be honest about how we feel about our lives.

Let's not sugarcoat anything because no one will truly know how you feel except for yourself. Only when we are brutally honest with ourselves, that's when we can start taking control of our lives. If we are not satisfied with our lives, dig deeper to find out the root causes of why we are feeling a certain way. Once the root causes are identified, we can fine-tune our actions to eventually get to the lives we want to live.

I welcome y’all to ask yourself this question: "How do you truly feel now?"

Feel free to share your reflections, thoughts, or feedback with me @themagichen on Instagram or reach me at themagichen@gmail.com