Why We Live So Far from the Life We Imagine: A Gentle Unraveling of Self, Story, and the Quiet Drama of Being Human
Exploring the Distance Between Who We Are and Who We Hope to Be
What are we, really?
Strip away the rituals, the sacred texts, the whispers of a soul waiting for salvation—and what’s left is strange and beautiful. A conscious body made up of thoughts, instincts, microbes, and emotions. A self that can watch itself. A life lived both from within and from without.
Our brain processes thoughts. Our senses take in the world. And somewhere in between, we convince ourselves we are a unified “I.” But even that is up for debate. Trillions of bacteria inside us guide cravings, alter moods, influence decisions. Our bodies feel less like who we are and more like something we were given—something we tend, like a garden we didn’t plant but are asked to grow.
When you remove spiritual scaffolding, the weight of meaning doesn’t disappear. It shifts inward. Suddenly we are responsible—for our health, our minds, our choices. If there is no divine rescue, then we are the architects of our peace and the caretakers of our chaos.
So why, knowing what nourishes us, do we so often turn toward what breaks us?
Why do so many of our actions diverge from our dreams? Why don’t we all live lives full of grounded joy, deep connection, and constructive self-love?
Could it all come down to trauma—small or large—that rewires our perception? To unconscious patterns inherited from childhood, from culture, from pain that never had words?
Or maybe it’s the stories. The quiet narratives we whisper to ourselves about who we are, what we deserve, and what’s possible. Narratives shaped by early experiences, misunderstandings, and a culture obsessed with comparison. Each person is living a different story, and when they clash, we often choose ego over empathy.
Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Take something simple: a friend doesn’t text you back. You replay what you said. You wonder if you said too much, not enough, the wrong thing. Hours go by. You’ve written a story in your head, and it becomes truth—until they respond with, “Sorry, I was offline all day. Everything okay?” The drama was internal. But the feelings were real. And this happens over and over—not just in friendships, but in marriages, careers, even world affairs. A story, misread, becomes a war.
And perhaps our deepest unconscious drive is to matter. To be seen. To be known. We build identities like shields. We sculpt an ego so we can feel important, necessary, different. Maybe it’s that ache for recognition that pulls us out of alignment—not malice, but a misunderstood longing.
We become so tangled in our inner world that we forget everyone else is tangled too.
We assume others are watching us, judging us, thinking about us far more than they actually are. The truth is more sobering, and more liberating: we’re all mostly invisible to one another. And that invisibility isn’t tragic—it’s freeing.
As Alain de Botton writes, “Almost everything that hurts us originates in our failure to master the quiet drama of being a person among people.”
Maybe we don’t need to grip so tightly. Maybe we can loosen the reins.
Because despite all this complexity, despite our confusion and our contradictions, we still get to choose how we show up. We still get to practice being more playful. We still get to choose kindness—toward others, toward ourselves.
We can observe the impulses without becoming them. We can tend the garden, even if it isn’t ours. We can soften the certainty of our beliefs, release the need to win, to dominate, to prove. We can accept the chaos without collapsing into it.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,” wrote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” But maybe we are also just beings—fumbling through a brief moment of light between two unknowns.
To live, then, is to navigate the tension between knowing and not knowing. Between the mind and the gut. Between wanting to be special and realizing we’re not.
And what a relief.
When we release the performance, we make space for presence. When we stop needing to be right, we can start being real. And when we stop seeing ourselves as the center of the story, we finally notice the beauty of everyone else’s.
So yes, we are mind and body. Yes, we are stories and bacteria. Yes, we are messy. But we’re also alive. Still capable of joy. Still capable of change. Still capable of love that asks for nothing in return.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s enough.