Why You Feel Like You're Watching Your Life Instead of Living It
You do everything right—the routines, the goals, the self-care. But you feel like you're watching your life through glass. That disconnection comes from treating life as a project to perfect instead of an experience to live.
It’s easy to feel disconnected from your own life. Like you’re watching it from outside rather than fully experiencing it. For some, this feels like a personal failing—like you shouldn’t have the audacity to feel that way.
But it's not. It’s the natural result of industrial systems that prioritize productivity over presence, metrics over meaning, and constant improvement over actual aliveness. And you deserve different.
The Numbness You Can't Name
You're doing everything right. The routines, the goals, the self-care. But something's missing. You feel like you're watching your life through glass—present but not really there.
It's not depression. You're not broken.
You're experiencing what happens when life becomes a series of improvements instead of experiences. When every moment needs to be productive or it's wasted. When presence becomes another goal to achieve instead of your natural state.
What Killed Your Aliveness
This much is true: presence can't be forced into existence through routines.
The industrial system turned life into metrics. Hours logged. Goals achieved. Boxes checked. It taught you to document experiences instead of having them. To schedule joy instead of feel it. To plan spontaneity—an oxymoron your body recognizes even when your mind doesn't.
Your numbness isn't a malfunction. It's your body's intelligent response to being treated like a machine that should constantly produce, improve, achieve.
The Practices We've Lost
Many African communities have understood that aliveness comes from participating in the continuous creation of the world. Not watching. Not improving. Participating.
Before life became content to consume, people knew presence came from engagement. Not the engagement of metrics, but the engagement of hands in soil, voices in song, bodies in movement without purpose beyond the movement itself.
The industrial schedule erased this. Replaced participation with productivity. Swapped aliveness for achievement.
What Your Body's Been Trying to Tell You
Every time you've felt most alive, it wasn't from following steps or checking boxes.
It was the unplanned conversation that went until 3am. The project you lost yourself in without tracking the hours. The risk you took without calculating the outcome. The gratitude that rose without a journal prompt.
Your body knows the difference between performed presence and actual aliveness. One exhausts. The other energizes. One requires constant effort. The other flows naturally when you stop trying.
The Return to Aliveness
You don't need five steps to presence. You need to stop performing life and start living it.
Follow what genuinely pulls you, not what should interest you. Take risks that make your body feel electric, not ones that look good on Instagram. Acknowledge impermanence not as motivation but as reality. Envision without strategizing.
The practices emerge naturally when you stop treating life as a project to perfect.
How Aliveness Actually Returns
It doesn't arrive through gratitude journals or mindfulness apps. It returns when you stop managing your life and start trusting it.
When you follow fascination without purpose. When you choose based on sensation, not spreadsheets. When you let conversations wander. When you stop documenting and start experiencing.
The return isn't about adding practices. It's about stopping the performance.
The Permission You've Been Waiting For
You already knew this. Every moment you've felt truly alive, you weren't following anyone's guide. You weren't trying to level up. You weren't performing presence.
You were just here. Fully here. Without trying to be.
The guide to deeper presence isn't a guide at all. It's permission to stop performing life and start living it. Your body remembers how. It's been waiting for you to remember too.
Signs You're Watching Instead of Living
You document experiences more than you have them. Your self-care routine exhausts you.
Spontaneity feels irresponsible. You schedule joy the way you schedule meetings.
Gratitude feels like homework. You're trying to maximize your rest.
Presence feels like another thing you're failing at.
If this is you, your body isn't broken. It's trying to tell you something. Listen.
