This Strange Truth About Your Life Will Completely Reset Your Perspective

It’s the fastest way to become the person you need to be.

Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash

The universe is not a giant living thing. It can’t taste an apple or look at nature in awe. To truly understand its own infinite self, it has to break itself down. Into galaxies, oceans, and into you. Into me. And everyone else. That means the universe is experiencing itself through you. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself,” astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan once said. Your job is to be more irreducibly, surprisingly yourself. “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,” mystic poet Rumi said.

You didn’t come into this world; you came out of it.

You are the universe alive, awake, and looking at itself. Now that’s strange. But there’s more. The truth is obvious until you make time to reflect on it. And start finding all the connections. I did. I will tell you what I found. All this means you have a moral obligation to be radically yourself. You owe it to everyone, including yourself, to just be your wonderfully weird self. No apology required. You have a duty to be original. If the universe wanted a billion identical copies of the same person, it would have made them.

But it made you.

What I’m saying is that being strangely yourself is not a personal choice. It is a cosmic duty. In ancient Greek philosophy, they called this telos. The original purpose or end of a thing. An acorn’s telos is to become an oak tree. Your telos is to become completely, irreducibly you. Whatever that means to you. When you force yourself into a career path just for the status, you rob the universe of your specific genius. When you suppress your weird obsessions. And try to fit into another person’s purpose, you close a window the cosmos was trying to look through.

You’re here to experience this specific, unrepeatable part of your existence, in a way that only you can.

You can live this truth right now if you do your job.

Do your job.

How?

Follow your true north. Notice what irritates you, what excites you, and what breaks your heart. If you try, it will reset your perspective on everything. It cures the anxiety of wondering whether your life “matters.” You don’t need to change the trajectory of your life to apply it. You just need to pay attention. To what moves you. What disgusts you. All the things you can’t stop thinking about at two in the morning.

And what makes you feel most alive.

Those emotional reactions are all signs of finding your zone of genius. Don’t ignore them. Strip away the hand-me-down identities. Ask yourself how much of your daily routine belongs to you, and how much belongs to the expectations of your parents, boss, or social feed. Start savouring the specific. What you feel, see, taste and smell. You are the only part of the universe that gets to experience that exact experience from that exact angle. Look at the world with absolute curiosity. Wake up to what you are: the universe, wondering what will happen next.

Figuring out life.

I like what zen teacher and philosopher Alan Watts said, “You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” If you take this seriously, it might reset your perspective on what your life is for. Richard Feynman, the physicist, was relentlessly, almost aggressively himself. He played bongo drums. He refused to mystify physics and insisted on explaining things in the plainest possible language. His distinctiveness was his work. The Feynman Lectures exist precisely because no one else saw physics the way he did.

Differentiation, then, is your responsibility.

The specific is always more powerful than the general. Your experience connects with people. Everyone is looking for windows. Something to see through, into a world slightly different from their own.

Take your obsessions seriously.

The things you find yourself returning to again and again. The problems you can’t stop turning over. All the questions you keep asking. The places in the world that fascinate. These are all signs to your awakening. To places where your particular view of the world has something to contribute.

And don’t look at your past as a burden.

Let your history be an asset rather than a liability. What you’ve survived, what you’ve seen, what you’ve failed at and rebuilt from. They are all specific to you. It’s what gives your observations meaning. The philosopher William James argued that every person’s experience is the only direct evidence they have of reality. Everyone else’s reality is, to you, an inference. Your experience is what gives your perspective value. It’s the one thing you have unmediated access to.

Use it.

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature,” says writer Joseph Campbell. You are the only successful version of yourself that will ever exist. And the strangest, true parts of you. The obsessions that seem too strange to you. Your weird approach to life. And the way you see the world. They are exactly what the world needs. Be better at being you. The universe has been working on your particular perspective for the entire span of your life. It has never made this exact thing before. It will never make it again.

The least you can do is let it be seen.

Before you go, remember what Campbell said, “the goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.”