The Machine

Something is definitely happening to us that I just recently put words around. It's an operating force in our lives, and in the life of pretty much every person you've ever met.

It's real. It's not hypothetical. It's a system, and it's been compressing your life from the outside in since the day you could walk, and most people never even see it.

It's also been accelerating recently for many different reasons…

I've been working with people on what it means to live a great life for the past twenty-five years. Thousands of them, from every walk you can imagine, successful by every external measure and quietly wondering why none of it feels the way they thought it would.

And when people bare their souls and tell the truth they say the same thing over and over again.

"Something's not right. And I can't put my finger on it."

Everybody knows it, at least a little. Some people feel it once in a while, when the house is quiet and there's nothing left to do and the thoughts creep in. But others feel it every single day.

It's like a quiet energy underneath life that just won't quit no matter how good the week was, no matter how much you accomplished, no matter how much you've built. And the ones feeling it every day are usually the ones you'd least expect, they're the ones who look the most put-together on the outside.

For years I told myself I had a problem, well actually the conversation was that I might BE the actual problem. I thought I was broken or missing something other people had. That if I just did more and had more, the feeling would finally go away.

I tried a LOT of things to fix myself. None of them worked because I wasn't the problem.

You're not the problem either. You're under attack.

Meet the Enemy

I call it The Machine.

Calling it The Machine is the least dramatic name I could think of, and it's still the most accurate. It's a system. It's running right now. It's running on you, and on me, and on everybody you love, so The Machine just fits.

The Machine is partly man-made and partly not, and honestly I'm not exactly sure where the lines blur together, but that's not really the important part. The important part is understanding that this thing is real, and the effects are real, and what it does to us is real, and once you can see it you can start to do something about it.

Picture your life as a wide open circle. It's full of space and full of energy. There's room to create and love and experience things. That's how you showed up, that's how every kid shows up, that's the factory setting on a human being.

Now picture forces pressing in on that circle from every direction, squeezing it smaller and smaller and smaller, until you're living in this tiny compressed space, suffocating, wondering why everything feels so cramped and anxious.

That's most people's lives right now.

The Three Arms

The Machine has three BIG arms.

The first one is called The Factory, and it got to you first.

Think about what happened to you when you were a kid. You showed up with all this energy and curiosity, you wanted to explore, you wanted to ask questions when you had questions, not when it was "question time."

Then it was trained right out of you.

At home it was wait until your father gets home, don't interrupt, ask permission. At school it was raise your hand and please wait your turn, ask permission to go to the bathroom or move through your own building.

Sixteen years of being told when to speak and when to sit down, and then somebody hands you a diploma and sends you out into the world and wonders why you can't figure out what to do with your life.

It's nobody's fault in particular, it's just the water everybody was swimming in, and the adults doing it to you had it done to them.

By the time you graduate you've never once experienced what it feels like to trust yourself and just move.

And here's the part that should make you uncomfortable, most of us are STILL waiting. For something. We don't even know what.

Then comes The Noise.

Once The Factory has done its job and you're standing there waiting for direction, The Noise floods in to fill the hole. It knows exactly how hungry you are, because The Factory left you starving, so it gives you cheap knockoffs of the real thing.

A little notification makes you feel important for half a second. Adding a thing to your cart makes you feel like you accomplished something. Being constantly busy masquerades as the aliveness you're actually craving.

But none of it fills the hole, it just makes it deeper.

The Noise has also killed your ability to be bored, and that matters more than people realize, because boredom is where pretty much all the good stuff actually lives.

And then there's The Future, and this one's the strongest of the three by a mile.

The Factory taught you to wait for permission. The Noise keeps you scattered and waiting for direction. But The Future keeps you waiting to actually LIVE.

You know the voice.

I'll be happy when I'm in better shape. I'll rest when things calm down. I'll finally feel like myself when I get the promotion, or the relationship, or the house, or the breakthrough.

Later. Always later.

The Future splits your life into now, which is never quite enough, and later, which never shows up. It keeps you in that gap forever if you let it. And it will.

Factory. Noise. Future. All three, at the same time, from the time you wake up to the time you close your eyes.

That's what you're up against.

Glimpses

For most of my life I couldn't see any of this. The Machine was just the water I was swimming in.

I saw it in glimpses.

I told you about one of them last week, the speech class in college when I stood at the podium and froze and drove home in an 84 Camaro with the voice in my head destroying me and Alabama on the radio.

That was a glimpse. I didn't call it The Machine back then, I didn't know what to call it, I just knew that something underneath the whole thing was bigger than my stutter.

Then there was 2010.

I'd been grinding for a decade and the numbers had finally started working. And I walked into a Porsche dealership and paid cash for a black 2010 Porsche 911 GT. Black on black. The car I'd had on my dream wall since I was a kid.

I drove that thing home and I was literally pinching the skin on my right arm going down the road.

"You're driving a supercar right now. This was the dream."

I called a friend and said "…dude I am floating."

And then about two weeks later, I kind of forgot I had a Porsche.

I'd walk out to the garage and it was just a really nice car sitting there. It didn't do what I thought it was going to do. It didn't flip some switch inside me, and it didn't make me feel like I'd finally arrived at whatever place I thought it was going to take me to.

It was just a car.

I ended up giving it away in a Realeflow product launch a little while later, because it really didn't mean what I thought it was going to mean to me.

But that was another glimpse. Something was off. The thing I'd spent fifteen years chasing had shown up and it hadn't delivered the feeling it had been promising me the whole time.

Did I learn the lesson? No.

I told myself a different story. The story went, you just haven't done enough yet, you don't have enough yet. The goalposts moved and I kept chasing.

It took me years and a whole lot more glimpses before I could step back and see the shape of the thing. And when I finally did, it was because I started noticing the same pattern in other people.

Almost everybody I worked with, high performers especially. They had the businesses and the houses and the cars and the lifestyles and they all had some version of that same quiet hum underneath.

The Real Fight

I want to be honest about something.

A lot of self-help frames your problems as internal and then sells you a fix for what's broken inside you. Some new mindset shift, some new morning routine, whatever the flavor of the month is.

And 99.9% of it sucks. It doesn't work.

But it misses the bigger thing, which is that you're not really losing a war with yourself, you're losing a war with a system that's specifically designed to make you feel like you're in a war with yourself.

The Factory and The Noise and The Future all feed the part of you that's scared and reactive and hungry for permission. And while they're feeding that part of you, the real you, the deeper one that already knows what matters and doesn't need permission from anybody, is sitting in the passenger seat watching your life go by.

That's what's really happening underneath the feeling you've been calling "off."

And the best news you'll hear today is that there's a way to win this battle, and it's really simple.

Only make decisions that are aligned with your higher self.

In other words, just quit letting your lower self run the show.

You'll make mistakes. I still get pulled under on a weekly basis, and I've been working on this for a long time.

But there's one question I've used to train my mind over the years, and if you ask it often enough, it really does start to change things.

Which part of me is this? Which part of me is making this decision?

Ask it when you let someone else control the temperature in your brain.

Ask it when you hear yourself say "I'll be happy when" and you realize you can't even finish the sentence without lying.

Ask it when you're about to do something stupid, especially when you're about to do something stupid.

You'll realize this really isn't you, you're not that stupid.

Start Pushing the Circle Back Out

You're not broken. You never were.

A part of you is perfect, it knows what to do. Let it.

Live Free,
Greg