When I dropped out of college in 2021, I was an emotional mess. 

I had been struggling with depression for over 10 years. 

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I heard it all. 

“Depression is a chemical imbalance.”

“You should try therapy.”

“You should read Meditations by Marcus while doing a cold plunge.”

While all of that is valid and does help, they don’t get to the heart of the real issue:

Depression wasn’t the problem, it was the symptom of a life that fucking sucked. 

I was 40 pounds overweight, got 0 exercise, watched porn 2-3 times a day. Hell, I’d put a random Big Mac off the street into my mouth.

How could I not be depressed?  

That’s the nasty cycle of depression:

Your life sucks because you're depressed, you’re depressed because your life sucks. 

In order to cure yourself of depression, you need to cure yourself of a shitty life.

You must build a life you love. 

How To Build A Life Worth Living 

Depression is your subconscious mind’s way of saying you’re completely misaligned with the life you could be living. 

To build out a life that doesn’t fucking suck, you need to figure out what that looks like. 

It goes in 5 steps: 

1. Crafting your vision

2. Crafting your anti-vision

3. Crafting the identity of your highest self, aka the one who lives out your vision

4. Figure out what they do on a daily basis

5. Start doing it 

But none of that works without step 0: 

Listen to your Inner Voice.

Napolean had his star.

Socrates and Goethe had their daemon - a spirit within you that pushes you to fulfill your destiny. 

All the great masters alluded to an invisible force driving them from within.

It could be God.

It might be the universe.

Whatever it is, it’s the final say.

Your inner voice will be the ultimate judge in how fulfilling your life is. You can’t begin to change your life without listening. 

Your inner voice is the culmination of the unique gifts you were born with. 

But you’ve been taught to suppress it. 

Imagine if Einstein didn’t follow his inner voice. Instead of the clerk job, he could’ve been an engineer in his father’s company. He wouldn’t have had the downtime to think about relativity for years. 

Or what if he didn’t dare to question the accepted notions of physics. What if he never questioned the aether? 

Depression and anxiety are really your inner voice’s ways of telling you you’re doing something wrong. 

Your path to building a life that you love begins with listening to your inner voice. 

How To Rediscover Your Inner Voice

Your inner voice was loudest when you were a kid. You most likely to have followed it back then.

For myself, I read Wikipedia articles about the solar system, black holes, the sun, and outer space in general. I was obsessed with the Magic Treehouse books. I even carried around a book called The Human Body from Disney Learning. 

(Goes to show how kids are inherently polymathic, but that’s an article for another day.)

When I was put through school, they wouldn’t let me learn about what interested me while I was in school. As a multi-passionate, multi-talented kid, I knew intuitively something was wrong. And it felt that way for many years. 

It led me to hating school.

Which led me to hating getting out of bed because it meant I had to go to school. 

Now I know what was really happening:

My inner voice was screaming in pain.

Follow The Goosebumps

Think back to those moments during childhood and your life when you felt complete joy. 

In my case my signal to follow is: if it gives me goosebumps. 

Think back to those moments and figure out what it was you were doing, and pay attention to how you feel. If you feel any type of rush, it’s your inner voice’s way of telling you to follow.

Take the time to ask yourself the following questions about your childhood:

• What were the activities or interests you enjoyed the most?

• What of those (if any) have followed you all the way through adulthood?

• What have you abandoned because someone told you “it’s not practical?”

Following your inner voice is step 0 of living your highest, Polymathletic life.

It won’t cure depression, but it’ll show you how. 

Up next, we’ll go over how to craft your vision (and your anti-vision). 

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Hey guys, been while! I’m gonna start pumping these out again regularly. 

Honestly, this isn’t my best work. It sucks in a lot of places, but I’m going to put it out because I know it’s best I move onto the next. 

Appreciate all the support.

Take care,

Aaron

If you take away nothing else from this article, let it be this one: