Are you still looking in all the wrong places?
What if the winning lottery ticket was in your pocket all along...
“It’s not about your material wealth. It’s about your inner state.”
—Michael A. Singer
There is no shortage of rich, famous, admired, and outwardly successful people who have committed suicide.
At the same time, there are countless stories of people in the poorest parts of the world, with virtually nothing materially, who live full, joyful, and deeply connected lives.
These polar truths confront one of our most persistent myths in our culture: that happiness is something we earn in the future, once we have achieved enough, acquired enough, or have enough money in our bank accounts.
If that were true, the rich and famous should be fulfilled, and the poor and deprived should be miserable.
But clearly, neither is consistently the case.
Happiness doesn’t automatically come with wealth, status, or success, nor does scarcity automatically bring suffering.
For a long time, I didn’t want to face that reality. I was fully invested in the idea that once I reached certain milestones, I would finally feel secure, worthy, and at peace with myself.
My happiness, I believed, was always to be found in the next achievement that would prove I had “made it.”
I suspect most of us live like this in some form.
We imagine that if we only had the money, the recognition, the relationship, the house, the career, the perfect capsule wardrobe, we would finally feel complete.
And sometimes, it actually feels like that might happen. The stars align, everything clicks, and for a brief moment, you get those things—and more importantly, those feelings—you so desperately wished for.
I remember a point in my life when I had earned my first-class master’s degree and bought my dream house in the country. On paper, it should have felt like I had arrived, like the search was over.
But it did not.
After the initial euphoria faded, I found myself just as restless, anxious, and uneasy as before. That experience made it painfully clear that even when you get what you have been so desperately chasing, it does not automatically fix what is broken inside.
For other people, external things may appear to do the trick. But even then, life always has a way of reminding you who is really in control.
Your partner breaks up with you.
You lose your job.
Someone you love suddenly and unexpectedly passes.
When any of these things happen, all the “security” tied to the outside world can teeter precariously, and the sense of stability we relied on can vanish in an instant.
For me, that reality hit hard when I turned thirty. I went through a breakup, lost my job, and moved back in with my parents.
Everything I had constructed my identity around—my achievements, roles, and carefully curated sense of self—quite literally cracked apart.
There was nothing to hide behind. It was rock bottom, and it forced me to turn inward.
Painful as it was, it became one of life’s greatest teachers, because it left me with perhaps the most important and uncomfortable question of all:
What was my life really built on?
Was it a genuine sense of purpose, or a desperate need for validation?
A calling I cared about, or a hope that others would admire, love, and approve of me?
We all do this in some way. We build ivory towers around the parts of ourselves that feel unworthy or unsafe, constructing elaborate mental frameworks and expecting the outside world to conform to them, hoping it will make us feel complete.
But eventually, life shakes those towers.
And when it does, the collapse is devastating.
Because no matter how impressive life looks from the outside, it was never built on solid ground to begin with.
So this is the backward truth I keep returning to:
Nothing is ever really about the outside world. It is always about the inside world.
Until we tend to our inner wounds, our fears, our values, and our beliefs about ourselves, nothing truly changes.
We can travel, accumulate wealth, and achieve goals, but everything we touch from that unhealed place is inevitably tarnished. We cling to people and circumstances, pulling them toward us as if our very survival depends on it—like a drowning person gasping for air.
So as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the best thing we can do is stop searching for a life raft, a buoy, or someone else to cling to.
The work is to learn to swim—to tap into our own inner strength, resilience, and stability so that we are no longer at the mercy of external circumstances.
Instead of asking the question that only addresses the symptom:
“What can I get from the outside world so I can finally feel okay in here?”
we might ask the one that gets to the root cause:
“Why am I NOT okay in here in the first place?”
I feel as though I am still only just beginning this inner journey, but there are a few practices that have helped me.
The first is to set aside a little time each day for meditation, even just a few minutes. It’s not about perfectly clearing your mind or suppressing anything—it’s about creating space between yourself and your thoughts.
You begin to notice that thoughts are not commands, not truths, not you. They are just events passing through your awareness. That simple recognition gives you distance and choice.
The second is realising that you always have a choice. When I feel disturbed by someone or something, I remind myself that I am not being upset by them—I am being upset by my perception of them. By my story. By my ideas of how the world should be.
In other words, I am upsetting myself.
And that awareness means I have a choice: I can follow the thought, feed it, and build an entire emotional narrative around it that causes immense internal suffering…
… or I can simply decide to let it go.
The next time you feel yourself being pulled down a familiar emotional rabbit hole that doesn’t lead anywhere positive, pause and ask, “Do I REALLY want to go there?”
The third is to see every difficult experience as an opportunity. Our hardest experiences always have more to teach us than our favourite ones. Yet we go through life demanding that things feel good 100% of the time, in a world we have staggeringly little control over.
It’s no wonder we are often so miserable when we only allow ourselves to be happy if the outside world matches our particular laundry list of requirements.
But what if it didn’t need to? What if our peace did not depend on external conditions?
That is what inner freedom is.
“You have no need to travel anywhere. Journey within yourself, enter the mine of rubies and bathe in the splendour of your own light.”
—Rumi
I am slowly coming to understand that everything we think we want in the outer world is really about the feeling we believe it will give us: safety, self-worth, peace, freedom.
But those things were never outside of us. They were inside, all along.
It’s like spending your entire life buying lottery tickets and hoping you’ll one day win the jackpot—only to realise you’ve been carrying the winning ticket in your coat pocket the entire time.
Imagine what would be possible if you could show up from that place of wholeness. The generosity, the love, the attention you could offer to the people around you—the way your presence could ripple out into the world—if you were standing on stable ground and not drowning.
When you are already complete within yourself, there is a natural depth and authenticity to everything you do—in your work, your relationships, and your life.
No amount of striving can bring these things, because striving itself comes from the belief that something is missing.
And it is precisely that belief that keeps us from feeling whole.
Whenever I catch myself being drawn into those familiar feelings that I need to start rearranging and manipulating the outside world to feel okay—which still happens all the time—I remind myself to start by tending to what is happening inside of me.
This awakening is the doorway to freedom we’ve been seeking all along.
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