You already have the answers and they suck
why you can't live up to that cool, new idea
We often live as though we’re searching for the answers.
We hunt around the self-help aisles, the YouTube channels, the spiritual teachers, feeling deficient—a question in need of an answer.
But even when we find answers that make sense, they don’t seem to land.
You want more fulfilling work. You know what you’re drawn towards—and other people seem to agree it’s the right direction for you—but you can’t pull the trigger.
A YouTube guru offers an answer to optimal health and well-being. But it feels like you’re fighting yourself at every step.
You read a book offering a comprehensive answer to managing your time and projects. You try it, but it’s gruelling and life feels like a never-ending, project management exercise.
You are taught a meditation technique that promises to alleviate suffering at its root. There are bursts of release, but you still struggle and feel lost for the other 97% of the day.
Maybe the answers are just not good enough? This is true sometimes, especially when the YouTube guru is involved.
But there’s a more fundamental difficulty that is easier to overlook: you already have answers to all these problems.
Those answers might be “I’m not as good as these people” or “I’m not ready yet” or “I should stay in my lane” or “I don’t deserve this”. They are the outdated scripts we follow. You watched that mind-blowing video last week, but you’ve been answering the problem it addressed since you were a kid. We make small bets every day, and over the years those bets turn into answers that author our lives.
And so the real difficulty is that we are already inundated with answers, yet lacking awareness of them. The flashy, new answers are not whooshing into a featureless, blank space—they are elbowing their way into a bustling metropolis of existing answers, some obvious, some silent and subtle.
You already have a fitness regime, a theory of relationships and a relationship to wisdom. Even if those answers are: “I should eat less”, “gym twice a week is enough”, “people are rational and I just need to make the right argument”, “I should just be happy with what I have”, “hard work is always rewarded” or “I just need to stay afloat.” Cynicism still counts as an answer.
Our answers can be very subtle. When we come to meditation practice, we already think we know what’s going on here: I am a meditator, and if I apply this method, I will realise something about reality/truth. But these seemingly preliminary elements are all answers in disguise. To move deeper, they must all come into question.
We also underestimate the power of our answers. They are not detached responses to an external reality. Our answers are creative: they shape our perception, tell us what to ignore and elevate, and provide the criteria against which we judge ourselves and others. As Iain McGilchrist wrote in The Matter with Things:
The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.
It’s comforting to believe in blank slates and the many tired computer metaphors that have infiltrated modern thought, encouraging us to swap beliefs in and out like memory cards; clean upgrades that only require you to be plugged into a power source overnight.
But there is no neutral. There is no way out. It’s impossible to live without answers and our answers are often forged in difficult times. The idea that we can hover in limbo whilst finding answers is part of what keeps us divorced from life and distant from the answers that are answering on our behalf.
We have to see how we are already living a particular answer before we can try something different. So instead of seeking more answers, try to trace the outlines of your existing answers. See how you think you already know what’s going on.
Instead of finding a better answer, exhaust your current one—wring it of hope, extrapolate it to snapping point. People often arrive in coaching with partially exhausted answers. The inadequacy of an old answer is becoming too much to ignore but they need the space to lay bare what’s left of it.
Your existing answer has to give up ground to create space for something new. It’s not easy work—it’s hard to see an answer when you’re living it. Many of our answers are outdated and embarrassing. But that’s ok: you are much bigger than your answers and if you dare to look them in the eye, you might be met by the freedom to answer differently.