Challenges of Life Could be the Answer You Need to Become Who You Are

Another 60 hours of fasting made me completely sick, but stronger afterwards. Yes, fasting has become a part of my life now. There is something in the voluntary submission to discomfort. It’s a choice to deprive yourself, to sit with the illness and nausea until it passes which teaches what comfort never could.

I didn’t always understand this. There were periods, deep moments, where the challenge was not chosen. Where the loneliness and the depression arrived uninvited and stayed far longer than made any sense. I was searching for meaning then, though I did not have that language for it at the time. What I had was strangeness, fear, and existential weight that pressed down on everything. Was I going insane? Perhaps that was the wrong question. Perhaps the more honest question was: what is this trying to show me? That is more interesting to me today, because in some weird way, it guided me forward and made me view everything in a different light. To want to move forward with my vision, which I will get back to.

I believe now that challenges, real ones, the kind that strip away illusion and leave you raw—are initiatory. They are not punishments or accidents, but they are the conditions under which you are forced to ask questions you would never ask otherwise. What do I actually believe? What am I actually made of? What is worth anything when everything comfortable has been removed?

My time in Southeast Asia and East Asia had already begun something in me. An invitation to challenges that later would appear. It was part of a inner transformation, with a guide there, a different way of seeing myself and the world, a heat and recklessness that loosened the grip of my previous assumptions. Perhaps not as dramatic as it may sound, but it sure did an impact in ways how I started questioning truth. Maybe I brought something with me, from there, that later would guide me to what I later became. Because guidance, we all have.

I began reading Daoism during those years, and something in it made sense in a way that Western frameworks had not. Not as a doctrine, more as of a philosophy of viewing how you and yourself has to find an inner recognition, in what you do and what you are becoming. Not that I knew particularly a lot about much at that point in time to begin with, but it was another chapter of myself. You know, in life, you have chapters.

The suffering that came later, the depression, the long dark stretches—continued what that journey had begun. It was not pleasant. But it was, in retrospect, the answer dressed as a problem. Now it just takes shape in other forms, and you can do the same. Channel it through rituals, like fasting for example. And the good part is, it works, like magic.

Daoism teaches something that is genuinely difficult to accept in practice: that the more you force control over what cannot be controlled, the further you drift from where you need to be. The more tightly you grip, the more slips through. This is not passivity. It is a different kind of intelligence—one that moves with what is real rather than fighting it. Once you are inside of something without realizing the tension, the challenges, because you are in complete harmony with whatever it is that has you occupied from all external expectations.

I’ve come to trust this. Not because it is comfortable, but because experience has confirmed it repeatedly. The phases of life you cannot manage, the ones that arrive and insist on running their course, do not yield to force or resistance. They yield to a different kind of engagement. A willingness to be inside of them, to walk through rather than around. Once this can understood, integrated in how this is a way of living exists, the value of nothingness appears. Yeah, it is real. The greater light of reality is shown. There is no longer but one way of being, doing and living for your values inside of it, as you now can see how so much is an act.

This philosophy is not naive during these times. We are living through a genuine geopolitical rupture. Europe is changing, and not slowly. Expanding conflict, surveillance architectures, the withdrawal of American strategic commitment of NATO, a new world order assembling itself in real time while most people are still operating on assumptions from twenty years ago. These are not abstract concerns. They are the context in which every personal decision now takes place. The old times are forever gone. And yet, or perhaps therefore, the Daoist insight holds with even more force, from a individual perspective: you cannot control the direction of the geopolitical current. You can only ensure that how you move through it is true to what you actually are.

Here is what I have come to understand about manufactured reality, since it is everywhere, and it is comprehensive. Algorithms construct the frameworks within which people form opinions and beliefs. Content shapes perception before perception can shape content. Most of what passes for individual thought is, in fact, conditioned response to carefully engineered stimuli. The opinions people hold with conviction are often fabricated upstream of their awareness. This is not a conspiracy. It is an architecture. And it is becoming more sophisticated, not less.

Against this, there is only one genuine resistance, which is your actual vision. The thing you see that no algorithm put there. Something larger that you care for. The thing that moves inside you when you are not being fed information, when you are sitting in a library or walking alone or fasting in silence. The thing that is irreducibly yours. I believe now is more important than ever, to develop this and let it guide you.

If you do not make it, if you do not create what your inside sees, there is a lack of you in this world. That is not a metaphor. Every person who suppresses their genuine vision in favor of manufactured consensus removes something from the collective that cannot be replaced by anything else. We have a responsibility to each other’s truth. To recognize what each person actually has to offer, beneath the noise.

Be past the point of what someone thinks. Most do not think, they react, conditioned and curated. Criticism will come, but no one waits for you. The more I think if it, the more evident it is. It is the easiest thing in the world to do, honestly, just make something along the way that you enjoy and the way you wish to see the world, anyway.

The fasting, in my case here, is not separate from the writing. The sobriety is not separate from the music. These are all the same practice: the practice of choosing what you are building, repeatedly, over time, in the face of everything that pulls in the opposite direction. You do not become who you are through a single moment of clarity. You become who you are through accumulation, through showing up for your own work, through the unglamorous hours, through the choice to create when creating feels difficult. Through going back to the library when the noise outside has become unbearable. Through beginning again after the fasting, after the darkness, after the long periods when nothing seemed to be moving.

The confusion and dread of these times, whether it is the geopolitical instability, the algorithmic environment, the economic precarity is real. The answer to it is not found within that state of mind. The answer is in asking: what do I see? What can I build? What would I create if I trusted, fully, what moves inside me? Come to the realization, there are things outside of your control, so better just let them go.

That question will not dissolve the world’s problems. But it is the only foundation from which anything real can be built. The fasting ends. The sickness passes. You sit down, and you begin.

Thanks for reading. Take care,
Tom