The Life You're Avoiding
Pursuant to the tradition established in my last article, I shall once more quote Mr Daniel Dyer — the preeminent moral philosopher of our generation — in this article. Mr Johnson expands upon his earlier thesis with what I believe constitutes one of the great philosophical contributions of the 21st century:
"Are you gonna sit in some poxy office with a cunt for a boss telling you what to do as you count your pennies? Go home to your cosy little flat in 'nowheresville' and pull your IKEA curtains shut to hide from the big bad world and pretend it's not happening? Or are you gonna stand up and be counted, make a difference and feel the rush? I'm coiled up like a spring and I'm ready to burst and wanking ain't doing it anymore."
Exquisitely put.
In the last article, we ignited the fire and smelted a five-year North Star. Lovely stuff. Very aspirational. Very inspiring.
Now we go somewhere uncomfortable.
Quick context for newcomers. This article is adapted from the materials in my Deep Writing programme — a dedicated small group container (maximum five humans) to get brilliant individuals finally publishing. Militant Zen kung fu master discipline meets cheeky soft side. "Sweetheart." "Heart of gold."
Ahemmm.
This module has four parts: Igniting the Fire, Smelting, Shadow, Crystallise. Part 1 covered the first two — the aspiration. This article covers the last two — the terror and the plan.
Part 3: Shadow
There's a peculiar quality to being muffled. You don't notice it happening.
Something feels off. A background hum of discontent. A sense that there's something latent in you. Dormant.
You had it when you were younger. Then you learned to muffle yourself. To hide. To compromise. Thousands of tiny moments where you chose to play it safe.
"Like water dripping through a rock," as my kung fu master Shifu Wu Nanfang says about slow practice building over time. But this moves in the opposite direction. Drip, drip, drip. We make compromises and slowly our soul becomes eroded.
Most people get burnout wrong. They think it's overwork. Half of it is, sure. But the bigger half is muffling. You're not exhausted because you're doing too much. You're exhausted because you're not doing the thing you need to do. Your soul is banging on the walls and you keep telling it to pipe down because you've got emails to answer.
I remember having a department coffee break with my supervisor, a big dog partner at Clifford Chance. What a lovely man. I feel for him.
He chuckled over his cup of tea as he said to me, "It's too late for me. Mortgage, kids in private school — I'm on the treadmill. Get out while you can, Ben."
Everyone sort of laughed it off.
But there was a part of me — somewhere behind the polite chuckle — thinking: shit. This is true. I looked around the office. At the partners eating lunch at their desks. At the associates billing until midnight, telling themselves it was temporary.
And I thought: I can't do this. Not won't. Can't.
Imagine: five years from now, nothing changed.
What does an average Tuesday look like? What does your body feel like? What do you experience under the mask?
I can tell you what mine looked like before I got a wiggle on. Sunday night. Standing in the shower. Staring down the barrel of another Monday morning. Dopamine stores completely ravaged from a week of working myself into the ground followed by a weekend of blasting myself off the planet. Nothing left in the tank. The abyss.
And then doing it again. And again.
The monotony. That's what got me. Not the excess — some of the excess was fun. But the monotony of the cycle. Work, blast, crash, repeat. The hamster wheel dressed up as ambition.
Some Theravada monks actually read out prayers pleading to wake up to how dreadful the cycle of samsara truly is. Because most of us are too anaesthetised to notice. It's difficult to escape something you have invested the entirety of your life convincing yourself and the world isn't a load of pretence.
You've kicked this down the road before. The rush of a new commitment. This time it's different. Then the quiet dissolve. The familiar sag of another abandoned start. That private disappointment you don't even bother talking about anymore because you're bored of hearing yourself say it.
We need to look at that. Properly. Not to punish yourself. To use it.
(Is it just me asking these questions? I thought I was crazy for years. Turns out I just hadn't met the right people yet.)
Deep work: Write your shadow version. 300 words. First person, present tense. "It's March 2031. Nothing changed." Make it specific. The body. The job. The mask. The quiet resignation. Make it so revolting that the fear of that overwhelms the fear of stepping into your power. Then write a refusal statement — a declaration that you will not allow this to happen.
Part 4: Crystallise
You now have a five-year North Star pulling you forward and a shadow pushing from behind. Two forces. Good.
But the five-year vision is the compass. Compasses don't tell you where to put your feet.
Big-picture intentions overwhelm unless broken into baby steps. We cascade from five-year down to annual, then 100-day. That way, in every intentional daily action, you can feel into the beautiful garden you're starting to water.
For each of your life domains, lay it out:
5-year intentions: Pull from your North Star.
Annual intentions (this time next year): 2-5 specific, measurable commitments that feed the 5-year.
100-day intentions: 2-5 specific, measurable commitments that feed the annual. If a 100-day intention doesn't clearly feed an annual intention, cut it or rewrite it.
Then write your 100-Day Vision (400-500 words). First person, present tense.
"It's day 100. The programme ends today."
What you've created. What opened inside you. How you feel. How your days look. What people notice. What you see when you look back at the you who started.
Deep work: Write your full cascade — all domains, all three timeframes — and your 100-Day Vision. Save it somewhere you'll actually look at it. Review weekly. Without the weekly review, visions become abandoned documents. (I use Notion. We set this up in the programme. Use whatever works.)
You now have the exercises. The structure. The prompts. The aspiration and the terror. Approximately 99% more than most coaching programmes would give away in a blog post.
What you don't have is the container. The five humans holding you accountable. The coach reviewing your work and telling you where you're hiding. The weekly calls. The daily embodied practice. The AI systems trained on your voice.
But you've got the exercises. The only question is whether you'll actually do them.
(I'm betting on you. But I've been wrong before.)
Toodles.
