Sometimes my YouTube algorithm scares me with how on point it can be😳

No longer believing in Christianity has made my life much more difficult. I didn’t study religion in order to disprove it, I studied it because I wanted to be a good Christian. Big mistake 😒

Notes from Underground is one of my favorite books, but considering the position I’m in today, the Underground Man resonates with me more than ever. Knowing what you need to do to change your life and actually doing it are two completely different things. Overthinking, isolation, questioning everything, and sometimes becoming your own biggest obstacle. I’ve been experiencing a lot of this while trying to rebuild my identity. My question is, how many of us know exactly what we need to do but still can’t seem to get ourselves to do it? Give this video a watch. I’m curious what everybody thinks.

I think I’m gonna get back into my study of Carl Jung. I first read Modern Man in Search of a Soul about two years ago, and the more I read, study psychology, and reflect on my own life, the more I’m starting to believe Carl Jung might have been the greatest psychologist of all time.

I’ve been thinking a lot this morning about identity, depression, and the difference between choosing isolation and experiencing abandonment. Over the last three years, I’ve changed almost everything about myself. My beliefs, my relationships, my priorities, and the direction I want my life to go. For a while, isolation was intentional. I needed distance from the life I’d always known to figure out who I actually wanted to become. But something happened this summer that I didn’t choose. My relationships with my children changed, and the emotional impact was far greater than I anticipated. For months, I’ve been criticizing myself for not being productive enough. I know I want to write a book. I know I want to build this community. I know I want to help people navigate identity changes and difficult life transitions. Yet I’ve struggled to move forward. And this morning I realized something: Knowing what you need to do and being emotionally capable of doing it are two very different things. Sometimes what looks like procrastination is grief. Sometimes what looks like laziness is depression. And sometimes the person you used to be no longer exists, but you haven’t collected enough evidence to believe in the person you’re becoming. That’s what I’ve been calling the identity gap. I’ve also been thinking about Stoner by John Williams, which has become my favorite novel. It’s a story about an ordinary man whose life doesn’t turn out the way he expected. Yet he discovers meaning through something he genuinely loves. It reminded me of something important: A meaningful life and a successful life aren’t necessarily the same thing. And that’s the direction I want to take this community. Not endless motivational speeches. Not telling people to wake up at 5 a.m. and work harder. I want us to explore the psychology of identity, ask difficult questions, challenge the stories we tell ourselves, and take small, meaningful actions toward lives we actually want to live. I’m working toward coaching people through these kinds of transitions, and I want this community to be a place where we can develop those ideas together.