Get Lost
Will you give it a second? [Existential Explorer: Part 9]
UPDATE: Big news… I just finished my first book!
It’s the most original and probably coolest thing I’ve ever created. Even though it’s fiction, it wrestles with similar themes I explore here: meaning, identity, and staying human when the world is unraveling. I’m collaborating with a professional editor on the final draft and exploring the best path to publication (if you know an agent/publisher, hit me up).
👉 If you’d like to learn more or become an early reader (with a few special perks), find out more here:
The Way of Work explores stories of where we fit in the world of work. This is part of the Existential Explorer series. My last post was pretty popular (and stirred some debate):
Do you remember the Loom founder from a few months ago who was rich, but felt lost? He came up on a podcast I was recently interviewed on.
His post went viral, after people had a lot of weird reactions to it:
We love stories like this because they’re vulnerable peeks behind-the-curtain of an important person’s life (by Western standards). They have something we really want ($$$), while revealing they don’t have all the other parts that we know actually matter.
Imagine if the post’s title were inverted: “I am poor and know what to do with my life”
BORING!!!
This piece also has the unique effect of confirming whatever you already believe:
Money doesn’t solve big problems, or
Money would solve MY big problems, or
Work is the answer (keep working), or
Work isn’t the answer (stop working), or
You’re privileged, so STFU.
If you think I’m about to sympathize with the guy, that’s not quite the point of this post. Instead, I think all these reactions miss a critical piece of nuance:
We just witnessed a single point-in-time snapshot in a transition.
We didn’t get the full story. The before-and-after. A thoughtful retrospective after long-years of reflection. No, we got a single picture in the midst of a guy’s transition. It’s gonna be weird.
It’s like asking how I’m doing a few days after I throw my back out while putting on a sock. No, I’m not okay!
Or let’s say we sent you into the wilderness, and in mid-starvation, asked you to write a blog post about it. Yeah. How do you think that’d turn out?
Because if you’re in the middle of transition (rich or not), here’s the key part to know:
Being lost is the point. It’s okay. And it’s necessary.
One of the most counterintuitive lessons you’ll ever learn in a transition of any kind — job loss, death, midlife crisis, or just feeling stuck in general — is you have to go through the lostness before being found.
You’ll want nothing more than to get out of this feeling, to alleviate the pain ASAP, so you’ll take any option to avoid it. But in my experience, the trick to getting out of a gnarly transition is to live with it and not suppress it.
It’s one of those lessons that you’d really like to skip:
“Hey, I’d like to figure out my life and all, but how can I avoid that one really hard step?”
Instead, what do most people do: “Shut the hell up and get back to work.”
That’s what I almost did. I was an expert in suppressing my unease, shoving it back down where it came from, and getting busy again. I’m on like the 10,000-hours-level of mastery here, so I know what I’m talking about.
Maybe this founder guy, while awkward sounding, IS doing it right. Maybe he’s going to figure it out, it’ll just take more time. Maybe it’s okay what he’s going through. Totally normal, in fact.
Maybe disorientation doesn’t equal failure.
So, how do you “live with the lostness?”
(even assuming you don’t have the $$$ he has, but you’re still human and deal with human emotions)
Warning: these recommendations are going to sound so woo-woo, like I’m one step away from chugging some cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. But they’re, as far as I can tell, the truth:
Let the wildness phase stretch as long as you can, allowing yourself time to NOT have a thing figured out (i.e. no goals or deadlines to reverse engineer from).
Let opportunities emerge to you, rather than forcing yourself to take on opportunities (only respond to genuine pulls of interest/excitement).
Avoid grasping onto the “next thing” so urgently, aka the rebound (it may work, but you’ll likely become lost again).
Get into the lostness. Write about it. Talk about it. Take long walks. Do things to get out of your head and into your body. Do whatever you need, just stop trying to escape!
Optional: don’t share your feelings online during this phase.
If you want to find something genuine and intrinsic, and your life up to this point has been built on a cage of expectations, it’s going to take some time to get out. I wrote before:
Instead of stopping at the first off-ramp, with the need to define or distract, we replace trying to answer with asking. True exploration demands that you sit in the fog, and stay lost on purpose. It’s deeply unproductive, often lonely, maddeningly inconclusive. But it requires loosening your grip: on certainty, on speed, on the self you think you have to be. — from The Open Frontier of Meaning
That was pretty good actually. Did I really write that?
As I’ve shared before, I’m infinitely thankful I had the time and ability to disconnect — I wouldn’t have figured my stuff out without it. That’s why I hope to share my experience even if you don’t share my circumstance.
So go climb a mountain, write that self-indulgent blog post, and stop paying attention to the noise. Life isn’t a spreadsheet problem, where when all the numbers add up, everything turns out to be fine. It’s messy and you’ll have to embrace that mess if you ever want to “find yourself.”
Yes, you want to escape the wilderness eventually. No, you don’t want to be lost forever. But if you try to force yourself out, it likely won’t work.
And the most counterintuitive point of all may be: you don’t ever really “find yourself,” you just get more comfortable being lost.
🤯
So… will you give it a second?
I go deeper about the Loom founder, limits of freedom, and lostness in my recent interview with Brendan Frazier, in The Human Side of Money Podcast:
🎧 Ep: The Dark Side of Financial Freedom No One Prepares You For with Rick Foerster (Loom founder discussion starts around 30:20)
I’m more open than ever in this one 👀
After three years, I want to say I am no longer lost. I know where I am, I just don’t know what’s next, and I don’t think (much) about it. That counts as progress, doesn’t it.
I think this is exactly the way to frame this Rick and thank you for doing so clearly. It has similar rings to how to frame physical pain. Often the suffering comes from wishing things were different. This is the same here. Trying to come up with a sure fire alternative to working which answers all our hang ups is unlikely to be done in one fell swoop. Instead everything we experience is always in transition of some sort. It’s just when you have had such definite aims for so long we are conditioned to think it will solve all our problems. Instead it’s just the start of another transition.