Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

In your second clause i think perhaps you mean materialist[|ic] (or maybe physicalist) not physical. A soul, heaven, or other spiritual entities or spaces, aren't necessarily incompatible with a physical universe.

My favorite passage from this:

"a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

So very true.

Can you imagine what it's like to be on the other side of you?

I don't know you, and I wouldn't presume to know anything about you other than what you've revealed in your comments, but what I can say is that you've been handed enough lego blocks to build anything you want to, and it seems like you've set them aside because they're not the specific blocks that you had in mind to build the thing that you envisioned at some point in the past.

No one automatically receives happiness. But you have an obligation to work on yourself, to do better than you seem to be doing, at building a happy self out of the life that you've made. That obligation is a result of choices you've made to build a family. Like it or not, you owe it to your wife and children to do the extra work of finding the meaning and sense of significance that is absolutely there waiting to be uncovered by you, and put to use by you.

All of the extrinsic life experiences you've mentioned in your comments do not entitle you to wait for something to click, to be more than a 'yawning void of nothing'.

If what you're talking about is something that you face no matter how many good, wise, smart moves that you make, then you may need to face the reality that you need treatment for depression or some other issue.

No amount of travel or physical trials that you've put yourself through can supplant the reality that you can build for yourself by simply looking inward. In fact, it seems as though by constantly abstracting the search into various physical or worldly concerns, you've done the opposite.

Happiness and fulfillment are moving targets. Personally, I suspect that I may never get all the way there. But I've spent some time on the road you're describing, and I know it's a dead end road. It's ego, it's self-indulgence, it's blame, it's a withering loneliness that makes you a small island, one that can be described in just a few seconds with cliches, easily traversed by foot, and forgotten or ignored by others.

Whether or not you're clinically depressed, you should probably work on the quality of your relationships. Are there people that you can authentically connect with? If not, find them. They're out there. Are there people with whom your connection leaves you feeling bad or more isolated? Get rid of them. Are there people that you keep trying to connect with but it doesn't happen? Stop trying, and refocus your energy on authentic connections. Are there superficial connections that satisfy some social or validating urge that you have? Figure out whether your relationships with those people can be evolved into authentic, meaningful connections or not, and work on the good ones and discard the bad ones.

It's an absolute tragedy to waste all of the time and beautiful experiences and memories that you could be accumulating with all of the people in your life, for lack of addressing a few relatively simple and totally fixable issues.

> If you’re genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you’re doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.)

I find myself doing this. Avoiding books that I think might upset my current reality for no apparent gain. It does make me feel intellectually dishonest, though. As in, I should be able to read anything and handle it rationally.

Yeah, I know that feeling - it is hard to get past it when it happens and it certainly takes a while for me every time it happens.

This is certainly not a universal cure, but for me the ideas presented in this ted talk have helped: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?...

So, set a goal and work towards that - but, looking at your profile that suggestion seems trite and silly, because you are and have been doing that for some time. Doing difficult things falls into the same category.

My suggestion would be to pick something completely pointless - something that you could easily pay someone to do for you, better than you have time-skill for and then do that.

For example, I'm building a house. Fairly big, not huge, wooden. I have no training in it and it has taken 5 years of evenings and weekends so far. Any reasonable construction team would have finished in 6 months and it would have had better quality of work.

I love it - it makes me happy to look at the small bit that I finished yesterday and somehow it gives me a sense of purpose. Maybe it's just a distraction - something to keep away the existential dread, but so what, because nothing has intrinsic value, this purpose is the best possible purpose for me.