Who are we?
And who am I?
I'm not my high power degrees, nor my fashionable (and increasingly tattered) clothes.
I'm not my accomplishments, nor my nicely (rented) flat.
I'm not where I live, and not quite defined by my friends.
I'm not the story I tell myself.
Nor my hobbies.
I am not to be found in my bank account, nor what the newspapers once wrote about me.
I am not even my emotions – although when the strong ones appear, such as sadness or hopelessness, it certainly feels like I am them, until I listen to them.
When we strip all these things back, what is left, the true essence of me? The true essence of you?
It seems to me, I am my choices. The choices I make in life seems inseparable from the essence of me.
That is all I really am. My choices. And the life I get is the consequence of that.
But I want to go deeper.
To make choices, you have to have control of the steering wheel. Which gets us to this line from Carl Jung:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
If this quote does not resonate, you have not, unfortunately, begun the process of the inner journey.
Most of us, including me, live our lives on autopilot for the most part. That is a factual statement, not an opinion.
There are many angles to this, but this morning I just want to look at something as simple as my "daily routine". I get up at say 6 or 7, and will bumble my way through the morning, with some loosely acquired habits, and then "work" until 6 or 7. Maybe I do some sport, and then spend the evening doing whatever. Quite a bit of YouTube will appear in the evening, if I do not have plans.
Add on top of this another thing called "busyness". And algorithms – weaponised intelligence - YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok ChatGPT etc etc. Unfortunately, if "busyness" and algorithms eat up the remaining spare time you get in your day, there is not much time to really reflect on one's decisions, and how that feeds into the bigger picture of your plan for life.
Compound this state of mind – and accumulated behavioiur – what Napoelan Hill called 'drifting' – over weeks, months and years – and you have the autopilot life.
It all happens right in front of you, literally, but most of us are blind to it.
Step 1 is to become aware of your own behaviour. What does my day generally look like? Including the "down time" moments staring at the phone, or watching a video, time spent in evening etc etc. A lot of this may not be available to the conscious memory unfortunately. But your time goes somewhere in a given day.
Step 2 is the harder but more interesting part: why do I do what I do? This is making the unconscious conscious. For example, I text women sometimes when I feel lonely, to flirt, to ease the pain of what might be loneliness or a sense of hopelessness.
I do not have a real intention to have anything happen with them, and I suspect (some) of them too, but we all go along with it, pretending that something might, because it soothes some pain we have within us that we do not want to confront. This is quite personal and I will not elaborate here. But the point is: what is really driving my behaviour unconsciously is the part of me that says (eg) "I am lonely". Consciously, however I will tell myself "how are they doing, let's find out by texting them". Unaware of the true emotional driver.
The same phenomena can be said about many activities: the surface layer is not really where it stops.
Do I go to cafes because I want to pay 3 EUR for a coffee, or because having humans in the room eases a sense of isolation? (even if I do not talk to them very much).
When I moved to New York in 2024, I went to a few spinning classes, as I did when I moved to Oxford. While I "enjoy" sport, what I really was looking for was connection with people in a new place – and unfortunately a spinning class does not offer that. But it does offer a numbing, exercise-driven hit of hormones to at least feel good afterwards. But the underlying pain – let us say loneliness – will not be resolved by this.
A lot of American culture I think is this dynamic over and over – paying to sooth a pain, and not being aware of the pain, and so looking for an outlet in the wrong place. This does not help the person.
It is possible to repeat this over and over, for years, expecting the underlying pain to go away, and not knowing what is really driving it. Going to the gym will not solve loneliness, sadness, etc; but the hormones flooding the brain may provide temporary release.
And on a surface level this may manifest as something like "I like going to the gym, if i can't go [for whatever reason] I feel very stressed". There is a subtly here: the difference between I like to go to look after my body (good) and I must go otherwise I will be in distress, or upset, or go crazy (hostage to your own emotional state, bondage).
If one approaches life on this surface layer only then, apart from lucky breaks, I do not think one can get too far.
Because whether you like it or not, the emotional state governs most of your behaviour. If you do not agree, you are simply in denial of your emotions – or so cut from them that you can't feel anymore – common in many men.
No-one is exempt from this, unless you are missing the emotional processing part of your brain, physically.
Just because you can't feel emotions doesn't mean they are not there.
Here are some examples, some from personal experience, of how disconnection from emotions can come out in other ways and then interfere with your life:
- Lack of dreams, vision, motivation in life
- Autoimmune conditions (IBS) and cancers (read When The Body Says No by Dr. Gabor Mate for citations)
- Unable to control eating in evenings (past me, yes, now very easy)
- Mood swings (emotions trying to come out)
- Sudden onset of anxiety, despair etc "from nowhere"
- "Depression", "ADHD", "despair", "hopelessness"
- A feeling of disconnection from the body – "I am my brain with a body attached" (very common in thinkers and 'intellectuals')
– Unhealthy fixations on anything – eg making money, or political topics, etc etc
I hope with the above, you can see my point: to really make choices and be alive, you need to control the steering wheel.
that takes a radical awareness of your unconscious and emotional state.
it requires looking in the mirror very hard, and asking, with an honest enquiring mind, "why do I do what I do?" "what pain am I trying to avoid [or numb] through [smoking/sex/social media/porn/food/gym/sport/weed/texting/pick your vice]?"
and getting to that state of radical awareness is not an easy journey. you have to go to another planet – to the unconscious – and then back again, hopefully in one piece.
and that requires time, focus and attention.
things you will not have the ability to do, if you are on autopilot in life.
but once you reclaim your hand on the wheel, you will feel alive again, and are back in control of your fate. not the unconscious, not the emotions. you are no longer on autopilot. welcome to life.
addendum:
for the most part, marketing and propaganda exist to keep you in autopilot mode.
it is not 100% bad, there are greys, but for the most part, they keep you in autopilot.
and engagement based algorithms are 100% designed to keep you on autopilot. not that they are all bad – but it takes full consciousness to extract the good and discard the rest. and 99% must be discarded.
but I will give a few illustrations:
- "marketing" (as a practiced industry in commerce) and "propaganda" (in commerce and social affairs) are sciences looking at the question of how to control human behaviour. these exists as industries. behavioural economics looks at how to influence decisions that are made.
