Dave Kashen explores why chasing life milestones leaves you empty. The conversation challenges the "life as a journey" metaphor, examines the inner void that drives us toward status and money, and argues that presence matters more than arrival.
we've spent most of our lives, um, either being told or telling ourselves or both that we're not good enough and things are not good enough, but they could be in the future. And so if we just work hard enough, you know, we could get to the place where we're finally, we finally arrived.
And it, it, it's a, um, And just to be clear, there's like a societal, I think, mile markers around you get into college, you get a great job. And these, so there are like little tastes of it that seem to reinforce this concept, I think.
Yes. There's one of my favorite, I guess, videos is Alan Watts has this video called Life Is Not a Journey. And he talks about how the metaphor of life as a journey has you feel like there's somewhere to get and you're not there yet, but it's coming. Right. And you, you know, you go to, like you say, you go to kindergarten and then first grade's coming and then college is coming and then the job is coming and it's like always like, it's, it's coming. That thing is coming. And then eventually you're just like old and you're like, wait, I guess, I guess this is it, you know, but it's sort of like missed, you missed the whole, um, experience. Cause as he says, like it was, it was more like a dance. Dance, right? Or, uh, or dance to get somewhere.
Yeah.
Yeah. Like, uh, yeah, like you don't, right, exactly. You don't dance to arrive at a spot in the room. You dance to dance. And, um, so, you know, dance while the music's being played is sort of the poetic way to say it. But the, you know, the, where these link is that, that feeling, which I think is a really pervasive human experience. And we can even, we can even go deeper around like what causes that. Like, I think I'll just plant the seed of like, I think there's this core disconnection most people experience from our essential self that feels like a void that then has us think there is something missing there. You know, there is a lack, there's a void, you know, it is not good enough. And then the, our best kind of hypothesis, you know, conscious or not, is there's some external condition that once I've achieved,, you know, we'll fill that void, right? Like, like a hungry ghost. So, and then it kind of works, you know, at least in terms of obtaining more societal recognition, money, right? Status, like, and we value these things. Like, I don't want to poo-poo them, but also we can overvalue them.
