On wasting your life

The feeling that you've wasted or are wasting your life comes from a demanding source: ambition.

​Ambition, as described by Francis Bacon, is a powerful energy. If you can channel it and succeed, you're driven and busy. But if that drive is blocked, if you feel you can't get what you want, it turns sour, becoming resentment, anger, and a belief that the world is a bad, unfair place. It's ambition that lies to you, telling you that your worth depends on achieving childhood fantasies, status, and recognition. If you had no ambition, you wouldn't feel like you were failing or wasting your life.

​Similarly, our common idea of love is often a mistake, rooted in exclusion and expectation. We focus intensely on one "special" person, expecting them to complete us or make us feel whole, a hopeful act, but ultimately one of hate and separation. When they inevitably fail to meet these impossible expectations, that intense "love" flips to betrayal and anger.

​True love is not an emotion that can come and go; it's a direction and a worldview. It is non-exclusive; it sees the same potential for reason, love, and awareness in every single person, regardless of their current circumstances or actions.

​The path to a life without the regret of "wasting" it, and the path to true love, is the same:

​Let go of the false expectations that your ego and ambition pin on yourself and others.

​Recognize your true purpose is not chasing accomplishments, but the ancient wisdom: Know Thyself.

​Invest in the "Work of Life": Choose to do and say the right thing, the honest, just thing, no matter the cost to your reputation, status, or special relationships.

​A person who consistently does what is right is not doing it out of courage despite fear, but because they simply see no other option. That is the most admirable, fulfilled, and complete state a human can achieve.

​Stop chasing the vain, destructive goals of childhood fantasy (ambition) and the separation and expectation of false love. If you invest your time in simply understanding and doing what is right, the work of life, you will find peace and realize you are not, and have never been, wasting your life.