The 3 Obstacles to Self-Knowledge

Happiness is not a goal you can pursue and reach, it’s a byproduct of living your life the right way.

I stumbled upon this recently. And it hit me hard.

While “the right way” of course means different things for different people, it always depends on the choices you make.

The path of life is paved with choices.

But the thing is, if you don’t pay attention, you will sleepwalk through most of your choices and become a marionette of your environments.

And the big problem with this is that our environments are not built to help us get what we all want in life: health, happiness, meaning, and good relationships.

Think of the goals culture injected into us from a very early age. How the media and advertising industries play with our minds, how our food environments trigger us, and how different people can influence our feelings and thoughts.

Without proper self-knowledge, we will most likely blindly follow the signals that our environments set for us — almost by definition.

Without proper self-knowledge, we cannot carve out the path and make the choices that are truly meant for us.