Feeling is the point.
Why are you chasing after what you already are?
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!’” ~ Hunter S. Thompson
In a beautifully defiant meditation on feeling and meaning titled “Love Without Evidence,” I read a line that struck me to my core:
“We have forgotten how to feel for no reason.”
Exactly, I thought. We’ve actually trained ourselves out of our own innate aliveness, convincing ourselves that every emotion needs an external reason, every feeling must be earned. This profound forgetting is at the heart of a passage from my own work, “Unwinding Want,” a concept that seems to confound readers more than any other:
A good friend of mine once confided, “I want to not want what I want.”
A seemingly paradoxical statement that confronts reality.
And reveals the tension that arises when you hold conflicting wants.
So, how do you know what you really want, which puts an end to the inner conflict?You feel it.
Because it wants you.
Like a wild horse that runs with the wind, what you want is inside you.
A horse doesn’t run to get a feeling.
The horse feels like running.
Do you see the difference?
It’s the same with you.
I want you to truly feel this distinction, not just understand it intellectually. The feeling you’re after in life isn’t a destination; it’s the driving force! What you truly want isn’t out there somewhere; it’s already alive within you, waiting to be released and felt. And yet, we continue to chase after things: that new car, the perfect partner, a fatter bank account, the corner office. We spend our lives clinging to the false belief that if we just get whatever it is, we’ll finally feel something: joy, peace, significance, that glorious surge of passionate aliveness. But that’s the biggest delusion of all.
Watch a child at play. They don’t run around laughing because they’ve achieved something. They laugh because laughter bubbles up from somewhere deeper than reason. They don’t dance because they’ve earned the right to joy; they dance because the pure music of being alive moves through them. They’re not curious because it will lead to something useful. They’re curious because being alive stirs questions in them the way wind stirs leaves. Somewhere along the way, we learned to distrust this innate wellspring. We learned that feelings need justification, that happiness requires accomplishment, that aliveness must be purchased with the currency of external validation.
It’s like we’ve been programmed to believe our internal world is merely a reflection of our external circumstances. We think our emotions are triggered by what happens to us, rather than being an inherent part of us, flowing effortlessly from within. This fundamental misdirection keeps us on a relentless treadmill, constantly pursuing external fixes for an internal experience. We’re searching for the source of a river in the ocean, never realizing the spring is bubbling right beneath our feet.
But here’s what I’ve discovered in my own unraveling of this pattern: the very act of seeking becomes its own insidious trap. The more desperately we chase that elusive feeling of enough-ness, the more it recedes. It’s precisely like trying to catch your own shadow: the harder you run toward it, the further it stays ahead of you. The moment you stop running and turn around, you realize it was always right there, connected to you, moving with you.
I often reflect on the times in my life when I felt most alive, most connected, most profoundly at peace. Strikingly, none of these moments coincided with getting something I thought I wanted. Instead, they were moments of pure being: the surge of adrenaline navigating an unexpected challenge, losing myself in a conversation where time disappeared, feeling the warm weight of my sleeping child on my chest. In those moments, I wasn’t trying to feel anything. I was simply allowing myself to be present to what was already there, already unfolding.
We’ve fundamentally confused having with being. We think we need to accumulate experiences, achievements, relationships, and possessions to become someone worthy of feeling good. But what if it’s precisely the opposite? What if the very feelings we’re relentlessly chasing are the ground of our existence, the fabric from which we are woven? What if aliveness isn’t something we earn, but something we are? What if peace isn’t a distant destination, but our natural state when we simply stop fighting what is?
The horse feels like running because it is a horse. You feel like living because you are life itself. You simply need to stop looking outside and remember how to simply feel, for no reason at all. Your ability to feel anything—even sadness, even frustration, even longing—is profound evidence of the aliveness that you are. We’ve been conditioned to judge our feelings, to categorize them as good or bad, to pursue some and avoid others. But what if all feeling is simply life, expressing itself through you, perfectly and completely?
It’s the ultimate paradox: we spend our lives chasing feelings, when the feelings themselves are what we truly are. We are not separate from our aliveness; we are not outside observers of our own experience. We are the feeling feeling itself, the awareness aware of itself, the life living itself into existence moment by moment. The very thing we seek is the seeker. The feeling we chase is the one doing the chasing.
So, what would transform in your life if you truly grasped this? What would shift if you stopped trying to get somewhere and simply started being where you are? What if you trusted that the feeling you’re seeking isn’t absent but profoundly present, not a future reward but an eternal now, not out there but right here?
What if you simply let yourself feel, for no reason at all, just because you can, just because you are the very capacity for feeling itself? You don’t need permission to feel alive. You already are aliveness, looking for itself everywhere except in the one place it truly lives: right here, right now, as you.
P.S. If you enjoy listening to podcasts, I had the pleasure of going much deeper into these ideas in a wonderful conversation with Mark McCartney on his podcast, “What is a Good Life.” Click here to listen.
Stay passionate!
Your essays gallops like that feral horse you invoke, unbridled, muscular, and, refreshingly, uninterested in show-jumping over someone else’s standards. Yet as I read, a mischievous question kept nipping at the reins: what if our culture’s obsession with “evidence” didn’t merely muffle our feelings, but re-wired the very nervous system that detects them?
Neuroscientists call it interoception: the brain’s moment-to-moment reading of heartbeat, breath, gut, skin. When we strap every pulse of experience to an external metrics (likes, KPIs, bio-trackers) we outsource this native sixth sense to the cult of quantification. The result is a kind of emotional proprioception deficit disorder… we can no longer tell, from the inside, where our own joy is anatomically located. We need a dashboard.
So here’s my pragmatic add-on to your liberating thesis: practice senseless feeling the way musicians practice scales, daily, pointlessly, ten minutes at a time. Close every screen, stand barefoot on the kitchen tiles, and audit nothing. Let temperature, gravity, and that un-Instagrammable hum behind the sternum improvise together. This isn’t self-care; it’s self-calibration. Do it often enough and the next board-meeting triumph or romantic setback will register not as cause of feeling but as harmonic over-tone, music the body was already playing.
Our species also needs communal feelings, shared grief, collective awe, righteous anger, in order to weave social fabric. Evidence can matter there, not to justify emotion but to synchronise it. A protest without facts devolves into noise; a symphony requires a key signature. “Love without evidence” need not mean “love without consonance”. We can tune to each other without turning ourselves into tuning forks for external approval.
Thank you, Asacker, for reminding us that the horse runs because it is running. My addition is simply that we must keep the stable lights dim and the Fitbits off if we want to hear the thunder of hooves at all. And once we’ve relearned that inner rhythm, we can choose, deliberately, mischievously, when to let evidence amplify the chorus, and when to let silence prove everything.
Such an important post for me, Tom. Very resonant with what else I am reading. Thank you for perfectly articulating some ideas that are very hard to get across. It's so valuable for us to adopt the inside-out perspective, as the old world falls and the new Earth has not started yet.