What the heck is this feeling I feel?!
Unhappy at rest, unhappy at work... unhappy when you’re supposed to be happy
Hi, I’m Saachi!
If life feels like a chore, you’re in the right place.
It turns out the forcing is the very thing blocking the magic. The way out isn’t more hustle, it’s doing what lights you up and letting the outcomes organize around that.
Every week, I write about the science, stories, and experiments you can run to prove it to yourself. ✨
If you are constantly feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and low, it’s because you are forcing life to be something it simply isn’t.
Chances are, if you read the title and clicked to read this, you, dear reader, are one of the many, many, many of us, who are living day to day on low to high grade anxiety, tolerating a life we think we must live, to achieve goals we think we should want, to finally be happy.
And you know what you’re doing isn’t thrilling you. But you’ve convinced yourself this is what it takes.
You also have no idea what the heck else would thrill you AND get you the success you crave.
Does that hit the spot? Is that you?
The resume that looked perfect on paper
I was the quintessential hardworking student, then the quintessential hardworking professional. A straight-A student, valedictorian. At eighteen, my dream was simple: be “successful.”
I started my career at Deloitte Consulting as a business technology analyst, dreaming of top-tier management consulting, specifically Bain & Co. When I finally made it there, it didn’t feel like enough.
I was decent at it and enjoyed some of the work, but there was something missing. So I decided to venture into tech growth. It was a new and exciting field in India at the time, and it happened for me quickly.
I joined as the second growth hire at a SaaS startup that went on to become a $4B unicorn. About a year and a half in, the same nagging feeling returned. Heavy. Like my heart wasn’t in it, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t explain it.
So I left that to start my own venture. I thought the problem was that I needed to be my own boss to feel the passion. It was time to discover it.
The feeling came back even sooner this time, just a few months into the venture. It’s the feeling where you don’t want to do the work, and even when you force yourself to show up, something feels off.
The work isn’t satisfying. You feel like you’re betraying yourself, like your life has become one big chore.
After dilly-dallying a bit, I got back into tech growth consulting, thinking maybe that startup idea just wasn’t the right one.
But this time, about fifteen months in, I had a huge outburst in front of my founder-boss. I was also a few months postpartum (so yes, a lot going on emotionally), but I still couldn’t explain the outburst.
While things looked great on paper, it was a struggle to show up every day, to muster the motivation and willpower to keep going, to pretend to care even though I genuinely wanted to. It seemed like a chore to perform well and please my boss and team.
It’s that feeling we all know: forcing our way through the week just to get to the weekend, where we finally get to do what we actually want.
Only this time it felt heavier, more amplified.
Like something was dragging me down, and I couldn’t name what it was.
So I left again. I started a couple more ventures…
The feeling followed me everywhere.
I couldn’t get rid of it. It showed up in everything I touched.
How am I supposed to be “successful” if I can’t push through?
How do I move toward my goals when I feel like I’m driving with the emergency brake on?
I knew exactly what to do to make each venture succeed.
So why the hell wasn’t I doing it?
The question nobody could answer for me
This was the nagging feeling of forcing my way through life. Of pretending and performing when my heart wasn’t in it. Of treating life like a chore you have to show up for.
I felt constant low to high grade anxiety and had a mind consumed by overthinking, all the time.
I felt exhausted, lost, and profoundly stuck.
When I asked for advice, from peers, family, the internet, all of it made me feel like something was wrong with me.
Push through, they said. Once you get to the other side of success, you’ll be happy. You’ll have found your passion. This is what it takes to make it big.
But I couldn’t imagine forcing through years of misery to get to some “other side.” I couldn’t even face one more day of pretense.
It felt like a personal failure.
Like I didn’t know who I was or what I truly wanted. My feet never felt stable on the ground. I didn’t have the conviction to go after what I wanted.
I kept switching directions and decisions in search of feeling joyful, stable, calm, and confident.
Outside of work, I was never present with my kids, my family, my friends, always thinking about how I was wasting time away.
I felt as though time was running out and I was just being unproductive and lazy. But at the same time, I couldn’t get myself to take action.
Unable to make much progress, and being constantly in discomfort, a state of dis-ease, I finally decided to go inward to find some answers.
I asked myself:
What would it mean to live joyfully and vibrantly every single day, whilst still going after your biggest goals?
What would it mean to be at ease with oneself, to actually thrive inside and out?
To be peaceful, immersed in each moment with joy, patience, and ease, rather than constantly feeling the need to be busy, to perform, to be productive?
What would it mean to enjoy every single moment of your life, or at least the majority of them?
Can ambition, achievement, and ease coexist?
I looked around for anyone who lives like this, only to find that most people I know are in the same boat as me.
Getting by, trudging through life… but not passionately, not vibrantly, and definitely not with ease.
Overthinking, anxiety, and stress seem to be constant companions for most of us.
But why is that so normal?
Should it be? Is this really all there is?
Surely that can’t be it.
Naming the thing
So what the heck was I actually feeling?
This feeling is called misalignment.
Misalignment is the constant anxiety, overthinking, and restlessness that shows up when we force actions we don’t actually want, usually chasing goals we don’t actually want either.
We’ve ingrained a pretty wrong view of life mechanics.
And until I went deeply inward by journaling, self-reflecting (and really self-discovering), I saw the world exactly the same way everyone else does.
As we’ve grown up, we’ve adopted the view that we can only be happy if we achieve certain goals like money, success, and fame.
And we need to do what it takes, even if we don’t want to, to get there.
And so we force our way, trying to control this outcome without living in the present, overriding the things that actually light us up.
We think this is the fastest, most rational path to these goals, and so the fastest path to happiness and ease.
But in reality, all this anxiety, all this overthinking, is blocking us from tapping into the actual magic that can take us to our biggest goals.
The system hiding underneath it all
We’ve gotten it all wrong!
When you closely observe life mechanics, how serendipitous moments actually happen, you can see that there is a system underneath it all.
(This itself deserves a whole series of essays, which I’ll go much deeper into over the next few weeks. For now, the summary.)
How we think life works: we force actions to control the outcome.
In reality: outcomes organize around the aligned actions we take.
When we follow our curiosity, our intuition, call it the inner spark that pulls you towards certain things without rationale, things work out in the most creative ways… ways you couldn’t have planned, forced, or possibly imagined!
Why?
Because this inner voice of ours is actually a connection to a greater intelligence that exists in the universe.
It’s the same intelligence that helps you eat and transform an apple into you, and not something else.
It’s what grows an embryo in a mother’s womb without any rational or conscious effort from her to coordinate and give the baby what it needs.
It’s what coordinates all your muscles, your tongue, your cells, lungs, breath, all of it, when you speak.
You intend to speak, and it happens, without any conscious thought or rationalization.
It’s a dynamic intelligence that responds to different stimuli without conscious thought.
Notice, you don’t need to “think” for these things to happen.
You are a cell of something much bigger
That same intelligence running inside your body doesn’t actually stop at your skin.
There is no real boundary between you and the rest of the universe.
So when you set an intention, guided by that inner spark, you and the universe (which is really just an extension of you) start making it happen together.
The exact same way your body coordinates eating a piece of fruit, or forming a sentence, without you ever consciously managing the process.
You are a cell in a much larger organism: the universe itself.
And when you participate as a cell of this universe organism, you are in sync with what’s happening everywhere, and you participate with joy, ease, and intelligence, which helps you achieve your goals.
If you’ve read my piece on how I landed a top tier management consulting offer, you’ve already seen this exact system at work. You can read it here if you missed it.
So, the good news
If you’re misaligned, like I was, and still am at times, we need to remember to flip the switch back to alignment.
Every single time.
For when we stop trying to control the outcome, we actually stop thinking and make room for our intuition to grow louder, to guide us on how we can participate intelligently…as the cell of the universe.
In doing so, we live through creative pathways with exuberance, joy, and ease…
…and trust that this journey will lead us to our highest potential.
Now that’s a life worth living, isn’t it?