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The last 2 weeks have been tragic.
I found out a coach I wanted to work with was found dead. He took his own life. The more tragic part is in his content, he talked about how taking one’s life was selfish and hurt others the most. He had an ex-wife and a young son.
His son will grow up without a dad.
Yet his son will see his dad’s social media videos and be blown away by the persona he had. From one perspective, his dad was a titan of the online world, inspiring millions of people. From another perspective, he obviously didn’t practice what he preached.
Seeing someone die so young for no good reason really hit me hard.
Only a few moments later after I made this discovery, I learned that a young woman I used to drive around as a chauffeur, who later became a famous DJ, fell off a balcony in Bali and died.
She was blind drunk.
I wish I could say it surprised me. Hardly. Her relationship with alcohol had always been terrible. She would drink until the ambulance rolled up. Right before she died, she told her sister that nobody taught her how to be happy.
She tried to use alcohol to fill the void. It didn’t work.
Both these individuals fell out of love with life. They let a series of seemingly normal events rob them of their love of life. A few dark days turned into weeks, months, and eventually a tragic end.
This is why if you’ve fallen out of love with your life, it’s critical you do something about it. Now.
Here are a few uncommon ideas you can use to fall in love with life again.
1. Quit accidentally acting like a coward
The gurus will call people cowards.
I rebel against that idea. No one knowingly acts like a coward. It almost always happens by accident.
When you act like a coward you rob yourself of potential. You become less than you can be. Each day you lose a tiny bit of your personal power. After long enough you become a hobbit hiding in your bedroom full of wall-to-wall pillows to protect you from harm while telling yourself you’ve earned your self-care.
Cowardliness starts with ghosting. Not replying to people. Ignoring simple follow-ups. Not RSVPing to invitations. Hiding. Watching. Waiting. Being flaky. And most of all…
Avoiding hard conversations.
Cowards go nowhere in life. They fall out of love with life because they see everyone else winning and they blame their situation on personality traits or being neurodivergent when it’s really just cowardliness.
If you know you’ve been acting like a coward… that’s okay. But it’s time to stop.
Admit where you’re at. Start doing the uncomfortable things you’ve been avoiding. And for the love of god stop ghosting people because it’s ruining your reputation and making you look like a giant p*ssy.
2. Start making real decisions
Life starts to feel terrible when you can’t decide.
When every decision turns into a 6-month research project and still nothing happens. If you spend enough days not making decisions, you shrink. Your confidence contracts. Your options quietly disappear. You feel terrible inside.
Every big opportunity that comes to you requires a decision. And the right decision will never feel comfortable. You either make decisions with a yes or a no (not a maybe), or life gets worse real fast. And you fall out of love with it and don’t know why.
Decide. Today. 99% of decisions are reversible anyway.
3. Add more total randomness and chaos
The assumption is that if you’ve fallen out of love with your life, you’ve transcended into total darkness and are about to walk off a bridge. That’s not true.
Falling out of love with life looks more like boredom.
Every day feels the same. There are no surprises. You just want to make it through the day. Life becomes a game of survival.
The cure is actually simpler than you think.
Try adding in more randomness. Walk to the shops a different way. Drive to different places. Start random conversations with people. Buy the person behind you in line a coffee.
Life starts to feel less predictable when you do. And that helps you fall in love with life again too. The cool thing is when life becomes less predictable, your experience of time slows down as well. Instead of months feeling like days, they now feel like months again. Randomness forces the mind to take more snapshots and to operate less on auto-pilot.
Here’s where I’ll push you to go further…
Add in more chaos to your life too. I did this by having two daughters under the age of three. Every day is a tantrum followed by dinner being thrown at my face. Running a business adds even more chaos into my life.
I never know what is going to happen. I constantly have to grow and evolve to deal with the latest crisis and this helps me fall in love with life. Why? Because when I look back each year I realize I’m far more capable than I was the year before.
I’m about to do that right now. I’m 39 today. In a week I will be 40. The difference between the two characters is ridiculous. A year ago, I had a tiny team and half the following. And I was making half the money.
Seeing your evolution like that is deeply addictive. It makes you think anything is possible for your life.
But it all starts with a little more chaos. That’s what creates the growth and builds the resilience – so you don’t experience a little bit of stress and get fooled into thinking, “I now need to take a year off work.” No, you don’t. You need to learn to deal with a little stress and chaos.
4. Lower your stupidly high expectations
High expectations rob you of joy.
They make you think every situation needs to be perfect when the reality is the world is messed up, imperfect, and chaotic.
Plans don’t go to plan. Your cookie doesn’t crumble the way it does in the TV commercial. And your kids don’t grow up to be perfect little angels who never smoke weed or get blind drunk.
If you lower your expectations, it makes you happier.
You feel better with failure and rejection as a result. You expect things to go wrong and even begin to crave it. And on the rare occasion things go right, you can do a victory dance to Katy Perry’s “ Baby, You’re a Firework” song.