We all have these ideas about what’s right. What’s wrong. What’s good. What’s evil. And we organize ourselves into groups of people who think like we do. And we pit those groups against each other like sports teams. My religion. My political party. My race. My gender. My sexual preference.

We become convinced that our way, our cause, our point of view is the right one. And everyone else is wrong. We start wars because of this. We hate our own brothers and sisters. All because we’re so righteous. And we close ourselves off to all outside ideas because they don’t fit within our narrow group consensus. Are you really so right? And everyone else so wrong?

Who’s to say?

Who’s to say if we’re an invasive species? Who’s to say if we’re aliens from another planet? Who’s to say what our purpose is here on Earth? Who’s to say if God is a human, an animal, a plant, a fish, an alien?

Zoom out. Way out. Imagine that bright blue ball spinning through space called Earth. Zoom out farther until it’s just a speck of light in our solar system. Farther still, until our solar system disappears into the haze of a galaxy filled with billions of other stars. Keep going until Earth is nothing but a distant memory in an ever-expanding universe.

Do any of our human concerns really matter in the grand scheme of things? Are they worth worrying about? Fighting about? Hating each other about?

Who’s to say?

If God exists, I have to imagine this God created not just you, me, animals, plants, fish, bugs, and bacteria, but every last piece of stardust. And if there is a God, I imagine they would tell us to stop with all this nonsense. All this division. All this hatred. All this separating ourselves into groups and simply enjoy this little slice of life we get to experience. Stop taking the whole damn thing so seriously.

I didn’t choose to be here. Neither did you. The earth grew us like it grows oranges, tomatoes, cows, and dragonflies. So play the game as you will. Just don’t forget it’s all a cosmic joke. How uncanny is it that we woke up today as humans? How uncanny is life?

Who’s to say?

I descend from camp toward Lake Marie, through tunnels of wildflowers and alongside cascading streams, eventually dropping toward City Reservoir. Losing elevation just to gain it again. That’s how it goes in the wilderness. Love it or leave it.

The climb back toward treeline is grueling. Back to my one-mile-an-hour pace. Maybe less. I don’t know what’s slowing me down more, the climbing or the wildflowers. I’ve been photographing them, having fun with some good old macro photography. Every flower seems prettier than the last, so of course I must photograph them all.

I love how feminine wildflowers are. Like girls in the prime of their most exquisite beauty, pleading for attention. Pollinate me, please! I’m the prettiest of them all! Oh, how I wish I could, my lovelies. I’d pollinate you all!

I’m a sucker for beauty. Nothing excites me more than a beautiful woman, a beautiful flower, a beautiful lake, a beautiful mountain range. Beauty triggers something deep and primal within me. A passion. A longing to understand it. Embrace it. Love it with all my heart. Do you know how beautiful you all are?

If there’s any doubt that we are part of nature, just look at our women. There’s something remarkably flowerlike about them. So ravishingly beautiful they drive men crazy, causing us to do all sorts of irrational things in the name of desire. In much the same way, I desire these wildflowers, mountain ranges, desert canyons. They too make me do all sorts of irrational things. Like being here, for example.

One could easily call this form of recreation suffering. My legs ache. My feet stink. My armpits—well, we won’t go there. My nights are cold and sleepless, tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable, which seems impossible when I’m encapsulated like a burrito in a mummy bag on an inflatable air mattress.

The wind blows without rest. My meals are dehydrated. My water, I have to hunt for. Today, while looking for camp, I had to backtrack nearly a mile and descend 400 feet of excruciatingly steep trail just to fill my water reservoirs. No campsites near the water. But that’s just how it goes sometimes.

My coffee is instant. My creamer is powdered. My backpack is heavy. My clothes are filthy. I’m at altitude, so I have to drink enough water to avoid the headaches, nausea, and fatigue that come with dehydration. For lunch, I eat nuts and pepperoni. Not exactly gourmet. Bathroom duties involve digging a hole, which in these rocky mountains can be a chore in itself. And there are no coolers of beer. No burgers on the grill. No movies to watch. No love of my life to snuggle up with at night.

All of this for… what exactly?

Who’s to say?

I do it for the beauty. The passion. The lust. For completely irrational reasons. To write, you might say? Certainly. Though I could easily work a slew of other jobs to fund my lifestyle. Or better yet, write fiction from the comfort of my easy chair. Another Manhattan? Yes, please.

The novelist has it much easier, I say. Making up stories rather than trudging through the woods, scribbling notes and philosophical blather into a dirty old notebook. And yet I find the whole scheme worthwhile because even I get excited to see what I’ll write about while backpacking in the wilderness.

It’s certainly not the self-help motivational talk of I Don’t Want to Grow Up or The Introvert’s Path to Creative Genius. Both much easier books to write. Make an outline and start writing. Boom. Done. But this? This is something entirely different. More like divine inspiration. When it comes. If it comes.

As I said before, in the mountains I’m more receptive. Ideas come from nowhere. I never know what I’m going to think about, what I’m going to notice, or what will end up in the notebook. And that makes the whole process exciting.

Of course, I didn’t come up here just to write. That would be too much like… work. This certainly isn’t a work trip. (Shhh... don’t tell my accountant.) The writing is a byproduct.

I come here first for beauty. Second, to get away from technology. Third, to get away from people. Fourth, to get away from noise. Fifth... I could go on and on. The point is, writing is somewhere near the bottom of the list. Because if I came out here specifically to write, the whole thing would sound... contrived.

There’s a magic that happens out here around day three, when my mind finally stops wandering. Stops craving. Stops thinking about city things. And becomes blissfully silent. I find that kind of silence almost impossible to reach in our busy society. And in today’s world, I think that’s becoming increasingly rare.

Stillness is worth pursuing. At times, I think it may even be crucial for our sanity. We need the experience of shutting off technology. All technology. Including the damn phone! And getting back to what’s real.

In the wilderness, everything I see is real. The mountains have no agenda. The marmots aren’t trying to sell me anything. The creeks and rivers aren’t sponsored by Pepsi-Cola. Nothing costs money. I’m free to wander at will. No entrance fee. No nightly rate. No late checkout fee. No expenses. No credit card.

I’m a free man.

And the only things racing through my mind are feelings of gratitude. Gratitude that these places still exist. That my body is still able to climb mountains. That those who came before us had the wisdom to protect these sacred lands. The Weminuche Wilderness. All 499,771 acres. And I’m somewhere in the middle of it, still wandering. Still wondering. Not entirely sure where any of this is leading.

The afternoon is getting late. I still need water. A place to sleep. Shelter from the wind. All these philosophical questions will have to wait.

I shoulder my pack and start walking again.

“The art of not being ready and doing it anyway will take you far.”

It got 1.6 million views, which made me think there are a lot of people who feel this way. Here are a few of the popular reader comments:

“Nobody is ever truly ready for anything. Sometimes, you just have to take the leap, do it, and believe that you can. You’ll never know what lies ahead if you never take the chance to try.”

“It’s because not feeling ready is an illusion to keep you small.”

“You don’t need to feel 100% ready before starting. Often, action gives you the experience and confidence that preparation alone can’t. Start small, learn along the way, then improve as you go.”

And then, of course, there were the arguments:

“Given a chance to fly a plane, I might not be ready but good luck to me and my passengers.”

“All the way to the crash site…”

Lol. I have to admit, I get just as much entertainment reading the negative comments as I do the positive ones.

And okay, I get it. You cannot simply decide to be a pilot on Tuesday and expect to go flying on Wednesday. But there is a big difference between deciding to become a pilot and thinking about becoming a pilot.

I think this is where a lot of us get hung up. In the “thinking about it” stage. We think. And think. And think some more. We consider everything that could go wrong. We wait until we know more. Until we have more money. Until we’re more confident. Until life settles down. Until we feel ready.

But as we know, we can overthink our entire lives away. Meanwhile, life is passing us by.

The key is taking action steps toward becoming a pilot rather than just thinking about it. If you are really serious about being a pilot, start by making a list of all the things you need to do to become one. Then do the first thing.

It’s amazing how action inspires confidence and creates momentum. Once you take that very first step, no matter how small, you are on the path to becoming a pilot. And if you keep taking the necessary steps, eventually you will get through them all. And one day, you’re a pilot.

The Magic of Action

When my wife and I decided to sell everything and hit the road in a truck camper, we did exactly the same thing. We didn’t just think about traveling. We made a list of all the action steps we needed to take to make our dream a reality.

Sell our belongings. Sell our cars. Sell our house. Purchase the truck camper and retrofit it the way we wanted it. Buy the appropriate maps and gear for the trip. Figure out where we were going.

And then we started checking things off, one by one. Eventually, the last step was complete, and we hit the road.

After all these years, I still don’t feel any more ready than I ever did. But I’ve learned to trust momentum. I’ve learned that if you want to do something, one of the best things you can do is make a list of action steps and start checking them off. Because I know the magic of action. And I know that overthinking can take months, years, or even your entire lifetime.

There is magic in doing. There is magic in trusting. There is magic in momentum.

What Are You Really Afraid Of?

Is it really that we’re unprepared? Or are we afraid of failing, looking stupid, losing money, making the wrong decision, disappointing someone, or discovering that the thing we’ve dreamed about isn’t what we thought it would be?

But the fact is, you cannot know any of those answers until you try. Until you do the thing, it’s just an idea.

Put it this way: Would you rather fail at living your dreams or succeed at endlessly postponing them?

I read something recently that flipped the old question around. The question isn’t, What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is: What would you do if you knew you absolutely would fail?

Because you can fail one thousand times doing what you love and still live your life doing what you love. Or you can succeed at doing something you have no real interest in, then wonder, all those years later, why you have all of this “success” on paper but still feel so unfulfilled.

Failure isn’t necessarily the worst outcome. Spending your entire life waiting might be.

So, What’s Preventing You?

What’s preventing you from doing the thing you really want to do? Is it really that you’re not ready? What are you afraid of?

It’s time to get real with yourself and uncover the real reasons you keep procrastinating. Because until you figure that out, your dream will be just that. A dream.

You don’t have to accomplish the whole thing tomorrow. You don’t have to know exactly how it’s going to turn out. You don’t even have to feel ready. You just have to figure out the first step and take it.

Because the idea is to die with memories, not dreams.

This idea—that there might be another way to live besides endlessly postponing the life you actually want—is a big part of why I wrote I Don’t Want To Grow Up. It’s about questioning the path we’re told we’re supposed to follow, figuring out what freedom means to you, and actually taking the necessary action steps to make it a reality.

Because none of us knows how much time we have. And at some point, you have to stop thinking about your life and start living it.

You can find my book, I Don’t Want To Grow Up on amazon.

Another cold night. Frozen water bottle. Restless sleep.

Sleep? Did that happen at all? I’m not sure.

I can’t get comfortable in this mummy bag. I’m a stomach sleeper, which doesn’t work particularly well when you’re wrapped like a burrito. Do I need to train for this at home? Start sleeping on my back? Side sleeping, perhaps? But then there’s the cold. I just can’t seem to stay warm enough. Dammit.

My first thought this morning is that I’ll pack it out today. I can’t do another night of this.

But then... coffee, sunshine, blissful stillness.

The wind on this trip has been unrelenting. It’s hard to escape it when you’re wandering around at twelve and thirteen thousand feet. Most of yesterday I wore my parka, fleece hat, and gloves. These rare moments of stillness feel decadent. The sun is warming my face. The trees aren’t moving. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day.

As usual, I’ll choose not to decide. I’ll see how it goes. Perhaps I’ll spend another night out here if it feels right.

Yesterday was brutal. And fantastically beautiful. I hiked over Trimble Pass and into another level of alpine terrain. The wind was unrelenting. At times, I was afraid. The whole thing was nerve-racking. I thought I might actually get blown off the mountain.

It felt like I was walking on the surface of the moon, far above treeline, with massive walls of granite rising all around me. Nothing but rock and sky. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to find shelter. Just me, my backpack, and a fantastic windstorm.

My legs were already shaking from exhaustion when I finally turned around. I couldn’t see anywhere to camp, potentially for miles. So I leaned back into the wind and climbed the scree toward the pass, retracing miles of trail until I finally found the place where I’m sitting now.

Finding shelter from the wind at this elevation isn’t easy. Yet here was this tiny meadow, neatly tucked among a few perfectly positioned boulders. The air was almost still. Through the trees I could see the surrounding mountains.

Perfect.

It’s 40°, but it feels like summer. The sun is brilliant, with so little atmosphere between me and its warmth. Step into the shade and it feels like winter again. I find the contrast fascinating.

There are so many wildflowers that I can’t avoid stepping on them. I try, weaving around patches of yellow and purple, but eventually there’s nowhere else to put my feet.

Does the rest of nature worry about such things?

How many flowers does a herd of elk crush when they bed down for the night? Does the elk care? Is this instinct toward preservation particular to humans? Perhaps because we’re capable of destroying so much, we’ve also developed the ability to worry about what we destroy.

But why?

Why did nature create us this way?

I look around and see symbiotic relationships everywhere. Flowers feeding insects. Insects pollinating flowers. Animals spreading seeds. Grass feeding elk. Death feeding soil. Everything becoming something else.

Are humans creating relationships like these? I’m sure we are, but from where I’m sitting, they’re harder to see.

The rest of nature does not seem to care about preservation. It just happens naturally. How did we become so out of balance with that?

The perfection up here is astounding. Of course, the pine beetles have severely damaged the lodgepole pines. Dead trees stand gray among the living. And yet the spruce trees are healthy and vibrant, filling in the spaces left behind.

Change.

That’s the word humans don’t like.

And yet we’re the ones inflicting enormous change upon the Earth.

What I find interesting is that we care about this. Does the pine beetle care that it’s killing the lodgepoles? Does it understand that acres of dead forest causes fires to spread throughout the American West, changing the landscape for decades?

I think we know the answer.

Nature seems to work through selfishness. The bee doesn’t pollinate a flower because it cares about the future of flowers. The bird doesn’t spread seeds because it’s concerned about forest regeneration. The grass doesn’t grow because it wants to feed the elk.

They simply do what they do.

And somehow, from all those seemingly selfish individual acts, the whole thing works.

But we care.

Our brains have the capacity to ponder such things. Not only are we destroying the Earth, but we know it.

So the larger question is: why?

If nature created all these relationships, why did it create us?

Are we some kind of anomaly? A mutant branch on the evolutionary tree? Or are we simply another temporary imbalance that will eventually work itself out, like the pine beetle?

Or... is all of our perceived destruction part of a much larger plan that we simply cannot see?

Did all these intricate relationships simply happen? Is there some larger intelligence at work? God, perhaps. But certainly not a human God. Not a man, or a woman, or an animal. But an energy. A force.

I’ve come to think of it as the blue light.

I’ve seen it many times. I first sensed it on my early backpacking trips. Years later, I encountered it during psychedelic experiences with psilocybin. I’ve seen it during Kundalini yoga. During breathwork. Different circumstances, different states of mind, yet they all seem to point toward the same blue light.

A glimpse behind the veil.

The cheat code, as I like to call it. Because you can glimpse it, but you can’t bring it back with you. You can’t put it in your pocket or explain it properly over dinner. You return with little more than the feeling that there is something there.

Out here in the wilderness, I feel it again.

The blue light.

After 52 years, I’ve stopped feeling the need to explain it. I don’t know exactly what it is. I only know that I’ve experienced it enough times that I no longer dismiss it.

Humans have such a need to prove things. We want evidence. Explanations. Physical proof. And there’s value in that. Science has given us extraordinary ways of understanding the world.

But I wonder if our fear of looking foolish also keeps us from asking the most important questions. No one wants to look like a quack. So we stay safely inside the boundaries of what can already be explained.

Out here, those boundaries seem less important.

If you really want to question what the hell is going on, come to the mountains.

What are we? Really? Why do we exist? What purpose do we serve? To save the Earth? To save ourselves? Sounds like insanity if you ask me. To suggest that our very existence is the thing we are trying to save ourselves from.

But what could be truer?

If we are the problem, who created us? Who’s to blame for our existence? Are our lives meaningless and destructive to the greater good?

Are we villains?

Building. Consuming. Creating. Destroying. Loving the Earth while simultaneously dissecting it.

Are humans out of balance? Is the pine beetle out of balance?

Perhaps that’s the underlying question beneath all the others. The one we keep circling throughout our lives, whether we’re sitting in churches, laboratories, therapists’ offices, or alone at twelve thousand feet staring at wildflowers.

Who’s to say?

The sun has climbed higher now. My water is beginning to thaw. Somewhere across the meadow, a marmot whistles from the rocks. The wind has started moving through the trees again.

I shoulder my pack and keep walking.

If you enjoy my nature writing, please check out my books at scottstillmanblog.com. Your support allows me to keep doing these adventures. Thank you for following along.

-Scott

20° last night. This old sleeping bag isn’t cutting it. I’m 52 years old. Circulation isn’t what it used to be. I get cold easier. My legs tire more quickly. My feet get sore. My first thought is to pack it up and head home. Being cold sucks.

But then... coffee.

Coffee makes everything better.

I rationalize. Better to suffer for eight hours and enjoy sixteen than bag the trip altogether.

Clouds roll in, swallowing the blue sky. A cool wind slips down the basin, rippling through the grass around my tent. I drain the last of my coffee and sit in silence. I’m camped in an alpine meadow. Dramatic cliffs wrap around this drainage called Crystal Basin. Heartbreakingly beautiful. Their gray walls rise hundreds of feet above the meadow, disappearing into passing clouds. Water trickles through the valley, though I can’t always see it. My camp is nestled in grass like a freshly manicured lawn, surrounded by wildflowers and granite outcroppings. Wildlife is everywhere. Tiny chipmunks dart through the grass. Birds chatter from the rocks. Large marmots, two to three feet tall, sit upright, eyeing my belongings—my food bag especially. I’m reluctant to leave my stuff unattended, even for a few minutes. Rascals.

Yesterday, on my hike here, I saw several large snowshoe hares bounding across the talus. It was a glorious ridgetop hike with views in every direction. And wind. So strong I had to wear earplugs for the noise and gloves to keep my fingers warm. The hike started off easy but quickly changed. A steep descent down loose dirt to a lake, then straight back up the other side. More loose dirt. More steep climbing. Every step forward threatened to slide half a step back. More suffering.

But I need this. Time away from the modern world. Technology. Social media. Cars. Trucks. Buses. Noise...

I need solitude. To recalibrate. To reset my mind. The suffering is worth the trade-off. In a few days I’ll be back to my cushy life. A warm bed. A stocked pantry. A fridge full of food. Back home I have everything I need.

But I also need this.

Out here, no one expects anything from me. No notifications. No errands. No deadlines. Just another sunrise and another place to walk.

I need to remember my essence. I need to remember who I am, stripped of technology, bank accounts, traffic lights.

It’s been just one night, and I’m already thinking of leaving. I’m becoming soft. Less comfortable with discomfort. Eighty degrees feels perfect these days.

We change.

So why am I up here? To write? To see that I still have it? To see if I’m still a nature writer, or just a self-help philosophy wannabe writing from the comfort of my home.

I’m cold. I’m sore. All kinds of doubts fill my head.

This is not recreation.

This is something else.

A test. A pilgrimage. A flashback to my early years of desert tramping, ridge wandering, and snow camping. Those were the days.

Nostalgia...

I spent my youth wisely. My greatest gratitude is that I had the wisdom to do it then, while I still had endless energy and passion. My heart weeps with gratitude.

Something about being out here makes me more receptive. Maybe it’s the absence of distraction. Maybe it’s the rhythm of walking. Or maybe the mountains simply ask so little of me that my mind finally stops spinning.

I just look. Listen. Feel. Smell. Taste. All of my senses are amplified. A hawk circles overhead. The breeze moves through the meadow. Clouds drift across the peaks as though they have nowhere else to be. I sit and watch them. Life feels more real. Less contrived. Essentially, I’m doing nothing—wasting time by today’s standards—and yet it feels more meaningful than simply getting things done. Does “getting things done” create meaning? If so, why do we so often feel as though none of it matters?

But here...

This matters.

This is meaningful.

This is real.

It’s funny what we deem important these days. Productivity. Profits. Results. Improvement. Success. Measurable statistics. Money. So we can buy more crap. A warmer sleeping bag, perhaps? It’s been years since I’ve replaced this old bag. I keep putting it off because of more pressing expenses. The funny thing is, I can’t quite recall what they were or why they seemed so important. Money matters, yes, but not to the extent we believe. In the city, we are ruled by it. Out here in the wilderness, the whole thing seems irrelevant. Ridiculous. Meaningless.

Day 2

The first rays of sunlight warm the side of my tent. Frost disappears from the grass before I finish my coffee. Soon enough the clouds return, followed by the familiar wind. More ridgeline hiking above treeline. But my spirits are high. Thank you once again, coffee! I say good morning to the marmots. Hello to the bugling elk.

This landscape is granite, yet weather and time have sculpted it into towering cliffs that look almost like desert sandstone. Small ponds are scattered about. Patches of green grass. Wildflowers. The scenery is stunning, but the hiking is unforgiving. More steep, loose ascents on ball-bearing-like pebbles. Lots of sliding around. I’m averaging 1.5 miles an hour. Not exactly a fast clip. But I’m not here to log miles. I’m here to camp, lollygag, write in my journal, drink tea. Ponder the meaning of life.

I envy the animals up here. They look so healthy, content, and full of life. How nice would it be to be born with everything you need? A warm, waterproof fur coat that never needs replacing. Surrounded by your favorite foods. Spring water everywhere. But I don’t mind being human either. I’ve carved out a good life for myself, with enough free time to do things like this.

I meet a couple—the only people I’ve seen on the trail. The man says he’s been out here for two weeks. The woman joined him a couple of days ago. Two weeks! Makes my four-day outing seem easy. How do you carry two weeks’ worth of food? I’m impressed. Perhaps I just need to get my backpacking legs back.

He’s from Ridgway, where he says a forest fire is burning just a mile from his house. Evacuation orders are in place, but he doesn’t seem worried or stressed. Serious backpackers are a different breed. It takes a lot to rattle their cages. They have a proper perspective on life. Not everyone is addicted to social media, television, the internet, and all the city things we think we need.

There are people all over the world right now walking the rooftops of the Earth. Sailing across oceans. Living out of backpacks. Choosing a different way to live. Oh, how I wish I could hear their stories. Expeditions I have no interest in attempting myself. What a privilege it would be to listen to them around a campfire.

They disappear over the next ridge, and once again it’s just me. The wind combing through the grass. The whistles of the marmots. Endless granite glowing in the evening light. Four days suddenly doesn’t seem very long.

Tomorrow I’ll keep walking.

I think we’re living through a meaning crisis.

Today, the average American checks their phone 186 times every day. That’s roughly once every five minutes while they’re awake. The moment we feel the slightest hint of boredom, we reach for a screen. One notification. One video. One message. One more scroll.

We’ve become so uncomfortable with empty moments that we’ve nearly erased them from our lives.

The tragedy is that boredom was never the enemy.

Boredom was the gateway.

Long before smartphones, our minds wandered. We stared out windows. We took walks with nothing to listen to. We sat beside campfires. We drove in silence. We waited in line with our own thoughts. Those ordinary moments seemed insignificant, but they were quietly shaping our inner lives.

They gave us room to wonder.

Who am I?

What do I actually want?

What kind of life would make me feel truly alive?

Those questions don’t usually appear while we’re consuming information. They emerge when our minds finally have enough space to wander.

Instead, we’ve built a culture determined to eliminate every second of boredom. Every empty moment has become an opportunity for distraction. The result is a cycle that’s remarkably difficult to escape. We distract ourselves with addictive technology, lose our sense of meaning, feel an emptiness we can’t explain, then reach for our devices again to escape the very feeling they helped create.

Meanwhile, human knowledge is doubling at an astonishing pace. Every year we know more than the year before. We have more information, more entertainment, more convenience, and more ways to stay connected than any generation in history.

Yet we don’t seem any closer to understanding ourselves.

We know more.

We feel less.

Perhaps that’s because information and meaning are not the same thing.

Meaning doesn’t arrive through endless consumption. It grows through reflection. Through wrestling with difficult questions. Through long walks, quiet mornings, handwritten journals, conversations that linger, and afternoons with nowhere to be.

Many of the qualities we admire most are born this way. Creativity. Wisdom. Original thinking. Deep listening. Empathy. They grow slowly, protected from the constant demands of a distracted world. They require space. They require stillness. They require solitude.

For years, I believed I needed to become more outgoing. I thought the answer was to fit into a noisy world that never quite felt like mine. The harder I tried, the more disconnected I became from myself.

Everything changed when I started embracing solitude.

Some of the most meaningful moments of my life have happened far away from people and screens. Walking through the mountains. Writing beside a river. Sitting beneath the stars. Those were the moments I finally heard my own voice again.

The solution isn’t abandoning the modern world. Most of us aren’t moving into cabins in the wilderness, and we don’t need to. The answer is far simpler—and perhaps far more rebellious.

Allow yourself to be bored again.

Leave your phone behind on a walk.

Sit in silence without trying to fill it.

Watch a sunset without photographing it.

Drive without a podcast.

Stand in line without reaching for your pocket.

Give your mind permission to be bored.

Rebel against this culture of constant stimulation. Refuse to spend your one precious life reacting to notifications designed by people competing for your attention. Refuse to become another statistic in the growing epidemic of anxiety, depression, and emptiness.

The death of meaning isn’t inevitable.

Meaning has been there all along. We simply have to become quiet enough to hear it.

🌿📚 These ideas are the heartbeat of my new book, The Introvert’s Path To Creative Genius. Despite the title, this isn’t just a book for introverts. It’s for anyone who wants to reclaim their attention, rediscover their creativity, and build a life that feels deeply meaningful. If you’ve spent your life wondering why you’re so different, I hope this book helps you realize your greatest gifts have been hiding there all along.

If you’re curious, you can find it linked here.

My most controversial book has officially been given a PG rating.

After much deliberation, It’s So Super F*cking Important (And You’re Not Invited) is being renamed The Introvert’s Path To Creative Genius.

I know. I know.

It sounds like the book went to therapy, got a corporate job, and started updating its LinkedIn profile.

But the truth is, that’s not why I changed it.

As much as I loved the original title, it didn’t do a very good job of telling people what the book was actually about. The book is about introversion, solitude, creativity, deep thinking, and why some people need time alone the same way others need time with people. The message has resonated deeply with the people who found it, but I began to realize that many of the people who would benefit most from it were probably scrolling right past because the title didn’t clearly communicate what was inside.

And honestly, I think this book deserves a wider audience. There are a lot of introverts, highly sensitive people, quiet souls, and creative minds out there who have spent their lives feeling broken when there was never anything wrong with them in the first place.

So the message remains exactly the same.

Only the packaging has changed.

That said, those of you who own the original X-rated version now officially possess a rare collector’s edition. 😂

I’m not saying it’ll be worth millions someday, but if civilization collapses and introverts become the dominant species, all bets are off.

P.S. The old version is still live... for now... for whoever wants it. In a few days it will be gone forever. 😭

Here’s the link to the 2026 Edition👇

The Introvert's Path to Creative Genius

To that, I have a simple response: it depends on what you mean.

If by privilege you mean that I was born a white male, then I suppose you’re correct. But I had no more say in that than anyone else had in the circumstances of their own birth. None of us choose our race, sex, nationality, family, or starting point in life. We simply arrive here and begin the journey.

If by privilege you mean wealth, however, then the accusation misses the mark entirely. I did not grow up wealthy. No trust fund showed up in my bank account. No inheritance financed my travels. No wealthy relatives funded my lifestyle. The money I have spent on camping gear, old pickup trucks, rent, plane tickets, and adventures came from working ordinary jobs—jobs that required no specialized education, prestigious credentials, or exclusive connections. In many of those jobs, I worked alongside people from every imaginable background. Men and women. Black, white, brown. Immigrants too. Some of them were harder workers than I was. Many earned the same wage I did. Some earned considerably more.

What separated my life from theirs was rarely income. It was priorities. While others spent money on newer vehicles, I drove old ones. While others purchased larger homes, I chose smaller spaces. While others pursued promotions, I pursued freedom. While many of my friends were building families, I made the personal decision not to have children. Not because there is anything wrong with raising children, but because I understood that parenthood requires enormous amounts of time, energy, and money—resources I wanted to devote elsewhere.

Every choice creates opportunities, but every choice also closes doors. This is the part of the privilege conversation that often gets overlooked. When people see someone hiking through the mountains on a Tuesday afternoon, they see the reward. They rarely see the thousands of decisions that made that moment possible. They don’t see the years spent living below one’s means. They don’t see the older vehicles, the smaller apartments, the skipped luxuries, the unconventional career paths, the uncertainty, the sacrifices, or the opportunities willingly surrendered in pursuit of a different kind of life.

The modern conversation about privilege sometimes suggests that our outcomes are determined almost entirely by forces outside ourselves. Certainly, circumstances matter. Some people begin the race farther ahead than others. To deny this would be foolish. But there is another truth that deserves equal attention: human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to shape their lives through the choices they make every day. Most people dramatically underestimate the power of what happens when years of intentional decisions begin to compound.

A person earning a modest income who relentlessly prioritizes freedom will often enjoy more freedom than a high-income earner who continually expands their obligations. A person who values experiences over possessions will often travel farther than someone earning twice as much. A person willing to live differently can often live far more freely than someone committed to meeting society’s expectations. This is not a statement about superiority. It is simply a statement about trade-offs.

The purpose of my writing has never been to deny that obstacles exist. They do. Some are significant. Some are unfair. Some are heartbreaking. My purpose is the opposite. I write because I want people to recognize how much power they still possess despite those obstacles. I want people to question assumptions they have inherited about what a successful life must look like. I want them to see that there are countless ways to build a meaningful life. And most importantly, I want them to understand that freedom is often less a matter of privilege than a matter of priorities.

Not always.

But far more often than we’ve been led to believe.

The greatest myth of privilege is that it convinces people their lives are determined entirely by circumstances. The truth is more empowering than that. While none of us choose where we begin, all of us retain some ability to choose where we go next.

These ideas form the foundation of my book, I Don’t Want To Grow Up. Despite the title, the book is not about avoiding responsibility. It is about questioning assumptions. It is about examining the invisible rules society hands us and deciding which ones actually deserve our obedience. It is about realizing that there is no single correct way to make a living, build a life, or define success. Through stories from my own journey of leaving behind a conventional path in favor of one centered around freedom, travel, creativity, and personal meaning, the book challenges readers to think beyond the script they were given and begin writing one of their own.

If you’ve ever felt trapped between what you’re told you should want and what your heart genuinely desires, then this book was written for you. Because growing up should never mean giving up on your dreams. It should mean having the courage to pursue them on your own terms.

A decision to make. A future to plan. A problem to solve. A conversation replayed for the hundredth time. We sit in our homes, staring at screens, turning the same thoughts over and over, convinced that if we think just a little harder, we’ll finally arrive at peace.

But peace rarely comes from overthinking. More often, it comes from perspective.

When the thoughts get too big, go someplace you feel small.

Go stand beneath a mountain. Walk into a forest. Paddle a river. Watch a thunderstorm roll across an open desert. Nature has a remarkable way of restoring proportion.

Most of what consumes us exists only inside the walls of our own minds. Mother Nature gently reminds us that life is larger than our worries, larger than our plans, larger than our need to control every outcome.

We worry about so much when freedom is right outside the door.

I have experienced this countless times. I’ll leave home carrying a head full of questions and arrive in the wilderness only to realize that none of them mattered quite as much as I thought they did. The trail doesn’t care about my five-year plan. The mountains are unconcerned with my productivity. The river has no opinion about my latest mistake. And somehow, that is incredibly liberating.

Out there, away from the noise, something else begins to happen. The labels start disappearing. The mental chatter softens. The endless categorizing and analyzing starts to loosen its grip.

The first things to drop away are the names...

I no longer see a rock, a lizard, a tree,

I only see.

There is a profound difference between looking and seeing. Most of our lives are spent looking through the lens of thought. We see a tree and immediately call it a tree. We see a mountain and call it a mountain. We see a problem and call it a problem. But occasionally, if we stay still long enough, we move beyond naming and into direct experience.

For a few precious moments, life becomes astonishingly simple. There is only the wind. Only the sunlight. Only the sound of water moving over stone. Only this moment.

And in those moments, answers often arrive without being chased. I’ve found that clarity emerges from allowing. From trusting. From surrendering our desperate need to know exactly how everything will unfold.

I find that when I open up and surrender to the present moment, accepting it for all its beauty and amazement, the universe guides me to all the right places. Decisions are just decisions. Either answer is correct. Just choose.

What if the decision you’re agonizing over isn’t nearly as important as you think? What if life is far less fragile than your mind would have you believe? What if there are many right paths?

Nature seems to understand this intuitively. A river does not obsess over every bend in its course. A hawk does not question whether it should ride one current or another. Life moves. Life adapts. Life unfolds. And perhaps we are meant to do the same.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that we belong to this living world. We began treating ourselves like machines that need to optimize every choice rather than wild creatures participating in a grand mystery. The wilderness helps us remember.

Every now and then, if we’re lucky, we stumble into a moment so complete that thought itself disappears. A moment where nothing needs fixing. Nothing needs improving. Nothing needs understanding. Only experiencing.

One afternoon deep in the backcountry, I tried to describe such a moment in my journal:

My alertness borders on intoxication, my senses excruciating. I think I’ve found the heart. The living, beating heart of this place. Not a single thought passes through my mind for what seems like an eternity. If the Holy Grail exists, I have found it.

I don’t believe the Holy Grail is hidden in some distant land. I think it lives in moments like these. Moments of complete presence. Moments where we stop trying to control life and simply participate in it. Moments where we remember that we are not separate from nature but an expression of it.

So if your thoughts have become too large lately, don’t try to outthink them. Go someplace you feel small. The mountains have a way of shrinking our problems back to their proper size.

A Final Thought

If your thoughts have become too large lately, don’t try to outthink them. Go someplace you feel small. Walk into the forest. Climb a mountain. Sit beside a river. Watch a sunset. Let the vastness of the natural world remind you that life is bigger than your worries and wiser than your plans.

The featured quotes in this essay come from my first book, Wilderness: The Gateway to the Soul, a book about stepping away from the noise of modern life and reconnecting with the deeper intelligence found in nature, solitude, and the present moment.

Since writing Wilderness, I’ve gone on to publish 7 more books exploring themes of freedom, travel, creativity, personal growth, and our relationship with the natural world. But this is where it all began.

If you haven’t read Wilderness yet, I think you’ll enjoy it.

It’s a reminder that the answers we’re searching for are often found far from the places we’ve been looking.

📖 Wilderness: The Gateway to the Soul, and my other 7 books are available at scottstillmanblog.com.

You can see it everywhere now. In traffic. In workplaces. In relationships. In the constant tension people carry in their shoulders and behind their eyes. Everyone seems exhausted, frustrated, irritated that the world refuses to obey their expectations.

We’ve become a society obsessed with control.

Control the outcome. Control the timeline. Control the narrative. Control the future.

But life has never worked that way.

As I wrote in Oceans Of My Mind:

“Those who adapt use existing forces of nature to their own advantage. They ride the tides and surf the rhythms of life. They’re constantly fine tuning their preferences until they blend seamlessly with their environment.”

Nature has always understood something modern life has forgotten: survival does not belong to the strongest force. It belongs to the most adaptable.

Some people spend their entire lives fighting reality. They push harder. Tighten their grip. Demand more. They believe frustration is proof that they need to force things even further. Yet the harder they push against life, the more life seems to push back.

Others move differently.

They observe. Adjust. Listen.

Instead of demanding the world change for them, they quietly begin changing themselves. They learn the rhythms of life the same way a sailor learns the sea or a backpacker learns the mountains. They stop trying to dominate existence and start working with it.

Ironically, these are often the people life seems to “work out” for.

Because hey understand flow.

When something isn’t aligned, they pivot. When a path becomes dangerous, they reroute. When an environment drains their spirit, they leave it behind instead of spending years complaining about it.

This is intelligence.

I think many of us were raised to believe life was supposed to be predictable. Stable job. Stable income. Stable future. But the older I get, the more I realize life has always been movement. Change is the experience.

The problem is that modern life rewards rigidity. Endless schedules. Constant productivity. Five-year plans. We cling to certainty because uncertainty terrifies us.

Yet the irony is that certainty itself is the illusion.

Economies shift. Industries collapse. Technology reshapes entire ways of living almost overnight. Even our own identities evolve over time.

As I wrote in that same book:

“This so-called security we’re desperately chasing—it is an illusion, a phantom, a ghost. Life changes and we must evolve with it. There’s only one way to survive this rapidly-changing world: learn to ride the tides.”

Some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned came from adapting.

You cannot force your way across a raging river. Sometimes you must walk miles in the wrong direction before discovering the safe crossing. When sailing, you cannot force the wind to go where you want. You adjust your sail and work with the conditions you’ve been given.

Life works much the same way.

Maybe that’s why so many people feel exhausted now. Because we’re trying to force ourselves into environments, identities, and lifestyles that no longer fit who we truly are.

There’s another way to live.

A softer way.
A more observant way.
A more adaptable way.

Because in the end, the people who suffer most are the ones who spent their entire lives fighting the current instead of learning how to flow with it.

This post was inspired by my book, Oceans Of My Mind — a reflective collection about the deep wisdom of the Mother Ocean. She does not force, panic, or cling. Rather, she moves in rhythms, adapts to every shoreline, and teaches us that strength is found not in resistance, but in flow. These writings explore what happens when we slow down enough to hear that quieter wisdom beneath all the noise of modern life.

If this resonated with you, you can explore the book here: scottstillmanblog.com

But what if the problem was never you?

What if the exhaustion so many of us feel today has less to do with failure and more to do with performance? The endless performance of trying to fit into systems, environments, and identities that were never aligned with our true nature in the first place.

In my latest book, It’s So Super F❤️cking Important: The Introvert’s Path To Creative Genius, I wrote:

“As humans, our greatest flaw is believing we are flawed. We spend our entire lives trying to fix ourselves when, in reality, the goal should be to become more of who we are—not less.”

That line came from years of observing something both heartbreaking and universal: how easily we abandon ourselves in order to be accepted by the world around us.

From childhood, we are subtly conditioned to seek approval. Certain traits are rewarded while others are met with resistance. So we begin editing ourselves. We smooth out our edges. We dim parts of our personality. We become digestible versions of who we really are. And after enough years of doing this, many of us can no longer distinguish between who we truly are and who we learned to pretend to be.

This is especially true for introverts, creatives, dreamers, wanderers, and highly sensitive people. Many of us grow up believing there is something inherently wrong with our nature simply because it doesn’t mirror the dominant culture around us. A world obsessed with noise will naturally misunderstand stillness. A world obsessed with productivity will misunderstand reflection. A world addicted to attention will misunderstand solitude.

And after a while, many of us stop trusting ourselves altogether.

We look outward for answers instead of inward. We compare ourselves to people living entirely different lives with entirely different nervous systems, desires, and callings. We try to become more like everyone else while quietly abandoning the very qualities that made us unique in the first place.

But history tells a different story.

Nearly every meaningful leap in human evolution came from people willing to think differently. Artists. Writers. Philosophers. Mystics. Innovators. Explorers. People who stepped outside the script instead of blindly following it. At the time, many of them were misunderstood too.

The irony is that the very traits we try hardest to suppress are often the source of our deepest gifts.

Our sensitivity may be the doorway to profound creativity.

Our solitude may be where our clearest ideas emerge.

Our refusal to fit in may be the exact thing protecting our souls from becoming generic.

Yet modern life constantly pressures us toward sameness. Algorithms reward imitation. Institutions reward compliance. Society praises predictability. And slowly, many of us begin editing ourselves until we become disconnected from the quiet inner voice that once knew exactly who we were.

This creates an enormous amount of suffering because the soul cannot thrive inside a performance forever.

We can feel it when we have abandoned ourselves. There is a heaviness to it. A kind of quiet grief. We may appear successful externally, but internally we feel fragmented, exhausted, anxious, or numb because we have drifted too far from our authentic nature.

The solution is not more self-improvement.

The solution is self-remembrance.

And to start asking:
“What remains when I stop pretending?”

That question changes everything.

Because authenticity is not something we create. It is something we uncover. Beneath the conditioning. Beneath the fear. Beneath the masks. Beneath the endless effort to become “normal.”

There is already a real version of us beneath all of it.

And perhaps the greatest tragedy in life is failing to realize we were already extraordinary.

The world does not need more copies. More manufactured personalities. More people abandoning themselves to fit into systems built on conformity.

It needs people courageous enough to become fully themselves.

That is where creativity comes from.
That is where aliveness comes from.
That is where peace begins.

By finally allowing ourselves to be who we already are.

If this resonated with you, my book It’s So Super F❤️cking Important: The Introvert’s Path To Creative Genius was written for people who have always felt a little different in this world—introverts, creatives, deep thinkers, and anyone tired of pretending to fit into a life that doesn’t feel like theirs.

You can find it here: scottstillmanblog.com

This year, however, I decided to run a little experiment. I added a number to the board. A financial number. The amount of money I wanted to make this year. Harmless enough, right? After all, I’m 53 years old. Maybe it was time to get more serious about finances. Maybe this was maturity. Maybe this was wisdom. Maybe this was simply what responsible adults do. So I cut out the number and placed it there beside the mountains and sunsets.

Then the year began.

By April, my mental state had become a mess. What’s strange is that so many of the other things on the board were already happening. I was hiking, kayaking, skiing, mountain biking—living days many people would dream of. The lifestyle goals were unfolding all around me. But because I wasn’t “there yet” financially, none of it felt like enough. My mind had latched onto the number, and once the mind grabs hold of something, it can turn life into a tunnel. Suddenly there is only the target, only the gap, only what is missing.

I became obsessed. Yes, me too. I know the language of freedom. I’ve written books about not worshipping the system, about designing a life around what matters, about refusing to confuse success with status. And still, there I was—checking, measuring, thinking about work constantly, wondering how to make more, wondering why it wasn’t happening faster. Mornings became strategy sessions. Evenings became silent stress. It’s amazing how quickly the mind can recruit you into a life you never meant to live.

I stopped noticing the beauty already present in my life. I stopped feeling grateful for the things I once prayed for. I was surrounded by abundance and somehow feeling poor. Eventually, I hit a wall. Depression crept in. Anxiety shot through the roof. I reached that familiar inner breaking point where something inside you finally says, I can’t keep doing this anymore.

And then, in the middle of that low moment, clarity arrived. Simple and undeniable.

Your work is not your life.

THIS is your life.

This breath. This morning light on the floor. This hike. This conversation. This body that still moves. This person beside you. This chance to be here at all.

I saw how far I had drifted. I thought about how many people live this way all the time—believing life is somewhere on the other side of achievement. Somewhere after the next raise, next sale, next number, next milestone. And I thought about what a hypocrite I’d become.

Money is a tool. Lifestyle is the point. Freedom is the point. Peace is the point. Presence is the point.

I had stopped living in alignment with my own book, I Don’t Want To Grow Up. So I let the number go. I took “my life is work” off the throne and replaced it with a much truer sentence: THIS is my life.

Almost immediately, everything changed. I noticed the beauty around me again. I felt love again. I enjoyed simple things again. My nervous system calmed down. My mind softened. Ironically, my income has actually increased since that shift, but that’s not the real victory.

The real victory is that my quality of life returned. My peace of mind returned. My joy returned. Sometimes chasing money creates less of it. Sometimes relaxing into alignment creates more. And sometimes the wisest teacher is the version of yourself who already knew better.

Sometimes the best thing to do is read your own books.

Unchanged is the word that comes to mind down here—in the wild canyons of southern Utah. Society moves so fast. Here, time stands still. More or less unchanged from the way it was. A few more airplanes in the air. A few more satellites in the night sky. A few more rocks dislodged from the sandstone walls, smashed into the canyon floor. But more or less, unchanged. I find something immensely comforting in that.

Nostalgia. In my 30’s, I had this sense of desperation. I wanted to explore every canyon, every mountaintop, every hidden spring. That kind of energy doesn’t stick around forever. It’s reserved for the youth. I’m changing. It’s inevitable. No better. No worse. Just… different. All I feel now is gratitude—for this life, this time to be alive on Earth.

I have lived.

Damn, what a thing to say. I’ve explored so many of these canyons in my prime. And still doing it at 53. Not done yet! No, my sense of restless ambition for exploration hasn’t subsided completely. A few trips a year to keep the soul pure. A time to remember… this world exists. A factory reset. A reconnection with Mother Earth, and the desert that helped guide me as a human being. My gratitude to her is endless. She gave me Wilderness, The Gateway to the Soul. Nature’s Silent Message. What more could I possibly say about the desert that hasn’t already been said in those two books? Written when the flame inside me was wildly ablaze. I was vulnerable, full of questions that the desert so graciously answered. It’s all in those two books.

But no one wants to read about nostalgia.

We don’t want the past. We want the raw fire of now! That’s what I intend to write about. Will always write about. ‘Til the end of my days. To jolt the reader, and myself, back to the timeless moment. Away from such distractions as clocks, cell phones, news reports, traffic, cubicles, offices, cars, gadgets, neighbors, to-do lists. None of that stuff really matters, does it? City distractions—all of them. And politics? I’d be a fraud if I didn’t mention politics. The whole us-versus-them conundrum. Down here in the canyons, it seems laughable. The only thing that separates us is whether we voted for the idiot on the right, or the idiot on the left.

We’re not so different.

We’re all just trying to get through this overcomplicated thing called life. Give each other a break, would you?

What really unites us? We want freedom, happiness, food to eat, art to ponder, water to drink. A safe place to raise our families. Or to choose not to have a family—and simply wander at will through Abbey’s twisting canyons. Muir’s ranges of light.

What’s really important? Read My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir, Walking It Off by Doug Peacock, Beyond the Wall by Ed Abbey, A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett. The point of life is not about money or politics or power or fame. It’s about gratitude—for the incomprehensibly beautiful planet that we get to live on. This country we were born in. And yes, to grow old with a sense of nostalgia.

To look back and be able to say, as Clark W. Griswold did so eloquently at the end of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation:

I did it.

But fear not! Cuz yesterday’s over my shoulder, and I can’t look back for too long. There’s just too much to see waiting in front of me, and I know that I just can’t go wrong. Another quote. Jimmy Buffet, master of escapism. Everything I’ve ever learned has come from songs. And books.

But dammit, I can’t help but feel for our youth. Sitting in their bedrooms, staring at their phones. Distraction is at an all-time high. They are beyond distracted. They’re disillusioned—primarily by lies. They actually believe they can’t make it in this world, which is truly sad beyond words.

The only difference between making it and not making it is mindset. If there’s one thing I can hope to do with my words… it’s to change that mindset. For the young people who already have the fire burning inside of them—the endless reserves of energy, passion, ambition—how I want them to realize that there are canyons to be explored! Mountains to be climbed! Oceans to be sailed! Rivers to be run!

And they don’t need a damn $80K Sprinter van to do it!

My first “earth roamer” was an early model Toyota Corolla, complete with kayaks and bicycles on the roof, backpacking gear in the trunk, a few gallons of gas in the tank (maybe), a few beers in the cooler (hopefully), and a couple cans of Dinty Moore beef stew rolling around in the backseat for dinner.

Ed Abbey explored in his government pickup. Doug Peacock in his Honda Civic (that was constantly overheating). Peter Jenkins walked across America in his blue jeans. And our great hero, John Muir, wandered the mountains of California with a knapsack and a crust of bread (that he was ever gracious for!).

No, kids, you don’t need a trust fund to be an adventurer. Just an adventurous mindset.

And who wouldn’t want to be an explorer? Especially today! Has there ever been a better time to escape society?

My point is… we are put on this Earth to enjoy the natural beauty that exists all around us. Mountains. Deserts. Oceans. Rivers. These things exist naturally. We didn’t build them. They are gifts from the gods.

But we get so easily distracted by money, power, greed, politics, hate, consumerism, lust…

Hogwash—all of it!

I say leave politics to the politicians. Let them fight amongst themselves.

Sneak out the back door, head toward your nearest mountain range or desert canyon, and finally experience some reality! That’s what these backpacking trips do. They allow us to finally experience some real, actual, bona fide reality. Truth! Outside the confines of our human world.

Go see for yourself. Find truth. It’s tucked deep into the hills. It’s out there... Free to anyone who can summon enough energy to walk, bike, hitchhike, or drive a car (any damn car). Just don’t forget to bring a shovel, perhaps a spare tire, some water and food. Perhaps a sleeping bag…

Freedom is alive and well in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Wilderness still exists—at least in the canyons of southern Utah.

But do it while you’re young, folks. Because when you’re old, the ground gets lumpier, the bugs bite harder, the feet get sorer, the knees get achier, the body odor gets stinkier, the backpack gets heavier, the wind blows harder, the rain gets wetter, the cactus needles sharper, the sand sloggier, the hills steeper, the sun stronger.

Do it now, folks, while you can. Before the best things in life do cost money. Then you can splurge on that comfortable chair. That expensive mattress. The guided tour. The scenic vista. The roped-off sea (lifeguard on duty). Then you can get a real job. Perhaps as a greeter at Walmart. A grocery store bagger at Ralphs. Or a bus driver, mailman, liquor store clerk. By then, you’ll be ready for some downtime after all that exploration and adventure.

Don’t worry about tomorrow? Is that really what you’re saying, Scott Stillman?

Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. It’s what I’ve been saying for years. If you are still with me, seven books later, you should know this… loud and clear.

Happy Wanderings,

-Scott

Recently, I started sharing some of these letters here in a series called Reader Stories.

Each one offers a glimpse into the struggles many people face when the conventional script for life stops making sense.

Today’s story comes from a parent.

Email from a Reader

Hi Scott,

I hope you don’t mind me reaching out. I’ve been reading some of your posts here on Substack and they’ve really made me think.

I’m writing about my son. He’s in his early twenties and completely lost right now. He spends most of his time in his room and has absolutely no ambition when it comes to a career. Whenever the topic comes up, he shuts down or says he doesn’t care.

He tried college briefly but hated it. Since then he’s taken a few part-time jobs but none of them lasted very long. It’s like he has no direction at all.

As his mother, it’s incredibly painful to watch. I would honestly do anything just to see him get excited about life again. I want him to get out of the house, meet people, experience the world—but I don’t even know where to start.

The hardest part is that he seems burned out before his life has even begun. He often says things like, “What’s the point?” or “Everything just leads to the same miserable life anyway.”

I don’t know if it’s depression, burnout, or something else entirely.

When I read your writing, something about it made me think of him. You talk about people who never quite fit into the conventional path, and that sounded a lot like my son.

I noticed you have a book called I Don’t Want To Grow Up. Do you think something like that could help someone in his situation? I’m willing to try anything that might help him get unstuck.

Thank you for your time,
Laura

My Response

Hi Laura,

First, thank you for writing and for caring so deeply about your son. A lot of parents feel this same worry, but many don’t talk about it.

I’ll tell you something that might sound surprising.

What you’re describing is becoming extremely common.

For decades, young people were handed a very clear life script:

Go to school.
Pick a career.
Work for forty years.
Hope retirement finally feels like freedom.

But many young people today look at that path and feel something isn’t quite right.

They see burnout everywhere.
They see people exhausted by jobs they don’t enjoy.
They see adults who followed the rules and still feel trapped.

So instead of feeling inspired by the system, they quietly check out of it.

From the outside it can look like laziness or lack of ambition.

But often it’s something else entirely.

It’s disillusionment.

Many young people don’t lack ambition—they lack a vision of a life that actually feels worth pursuing.

And when someone can’t imagine a future that excites them, they retreat.

They stay in their rooms.
They avoid decisions.
They feel stuck before they’ve even started.

One thing I try to do in my writing is offer a different lens.

Not everyone is meant to follow the conventional career path.

Some work seasonal jobs in national parks, guide rafting trips, or work as ski patrollers in mountain towns. Some manage surf hostels on tropical beaches or work on sailing charters. Some work on organic farms or on conservation projects protecting wild places. Some run small online businesses that let them work from anywhere.

But our education system rarely talks about those paths.

It mainly trains people to become employees.

For someone who doesn’t naturally fit that mold, the system can feel suffocating.

That’s exactly why I wrote I Don’t Want To Grow Up.

The book isn’t about avoiding responsibility or refusing to work.

It’s about realizing there are many ways to build a meaningful life, and the traditional career ladder is only one of them.

For some readers, the book simply helps them see that they’re not broken.

They’re just wired differently.

And sometimes that realization alone can be incredibly powerful.

I can’t promise it will solve everything for your son. Life is complex, and depression deserves serious attention and support when needed.

But what the book might offer is a spark—a new way of thinking about work, money, and what life could look like outside the narrow script most of us were handed.

Sometimes all someone needs is permission to imagine a different path.

That’s where change begins.

Wishing you and your son the very best.

Scott

If You’ve Ever Felt Like the Script Didn’t Fit

Over the years I’ve heard from thousands of readers who felt exactly like Laura’s son—burned out, confused, or disconnected from the traditional path.

They simply couldn’t imagine spending their lives inside a system that didn’t feel aligned with who they were.

I Don’t Want To Grow Up explores a different way to think about work, freedom, and designing a life around your values instead of society’s expectations.

If you’ve ever felt like the conventional script for life was missing something, this book might resonate with you or someone you love.

I Don’t Want To Grow Up
by Scott Stillman

A Freedompreneur is someone who structures their work around freedom first—not money, not status, not endless growth. The primary goal is simple: maximize time, autonomy, and flexibility. Money still matters, of course. But it serves a different purpose. It becomes a tool that supports freedom.

Traditional entrepreneurship often follows the same mindset as corporate culture—just with a different boss. Work longer hours. Chase bigger numbers. Build something that demands more of your time every year. Freedompreneurs approach things differently. Instead of asking, How big can I make this business? they ask, How little do I need to work to live the life I want? This subtle shift changes everything.

Rather than designing life around work, Freedompreneurs design work around life.

Many Freedompreneurs structure their businesses around high-value, low-time commitments. Take a consultant or specialist who charges $150 per hour. Working just three hours per day can produce a healthy income while leaving the rest of the day open for life itself. That might mean morning surfing, afternoon hiking, long lunches with friends, travel without asking permission, or time to write, create, and explore ideas. From the outside it may look like they don’t work much, but in reality they’ve simply optimized their work for efficiency instead of volume.

Not all Freedompreneurs work every day. Some design their lives around seasonal income. A photographer might work intensely during wedding season and then spend months traveling. A fishing guide might earn the majority of their income during the summer. A ski instructor might work winters and disappear into the mountains during spring and fall. The point is intentional living.

Freedompreneurs ask a question most people never stop to consider: How much work is actually enough?

Another common trait among Freedompreneurs is intentional simplicity. Instead of increasing their expenses every time their income grows, they focus on keeping their lifestyles simple. A smaller home, fewer possessions, and lower monthly costs create something incredibly powerful—flexibility. When you don’t need as much money to live, you don’t need to work as much to earn it. Many Freedompreneurs would rather live in a small condo than chase the bigger house and endless upgrades that often come with traditional success.

Many Freedompreneurs operate businesses that are small but powerful. Writers are a perfect example. A single book can generate income for years. A newsletter can support an entire lifestyle. Digital products, courses, and online content allow creators to build revenue streams that aren’t tied to a clock. These businesses often look modest compared to venture-backed startups, but they deliver something far more valuable: control over your time.

As a writer myself, I’ve seen how this kind of work can open doors to a completely different lifestyle—one where creativity and curiosity replace office hours and performance reviews. It’s a quieter path, but one that offers something many people secretly crave: freedom over your own schedule.

Freedompreneurs operate using a simple equation:

High value × low time commitment = lifestyle freedom.

Instead of working more hours, they focus on charging appropriately for their expertise, building systems that reduce busywork, creating income streams that don’t require constant labor, and keeping their lifestyles intentionally simple.

Society tends to measure success in predictable ways: a bigger house, a higher salary, more employees, faster growth. Freedompreneurs measure success differently. Success might look like working three hours a day, spending half the year traveling, or having the freedom to start new projects whenever inspiration strikes. In other words, success becomes time ownership.

You won’t hear much about Freedompreneurs on business news channels. They aren’t chasing headlines. But they’re everywhere. They’re the freelancer who lives abroad half the year, the consultant who only takes two clients, the writer who publishes books from a camper van, the designer who works mornings and surfs every afternoon. We’ve quietly rejected the idea that life must revolve around work. Instead, we’ve built work that revolves around life.

The rise of the Freedompreneur reflects a deeper cultural shift. More people are beginning to question the traditional formula: work for forty years, retire, and finally enjoy life when we’re old. Freedompreneurs flip that script. We choose to enjoy life while our knees still work.

And it all begins with one simple question:

What if the goal of work isn’t money—but freedom?

If you’ve ever felt like the traditional path wasn’t meant for you, you’re probably already thinking like a Freedompreneur. That’s exactly the idea behind my book, I Don’t Want To Grow Up. It’s a guide for people who want more freedom, more adventure, and a life that isn’t dictated by a rigid career script. Instead of following the path everyone else expects, the book explores how to design a life you actually want to wake up to.

But the opposite is true.

Solitude is where clarity begins.

Solitude is where you hear your own thoughts again. Where your nervous system settles. Where you stop performing and return to simply being.

This is why solitude is so important—and why the people who let you be quiet are so rare. They don’t interrupt your return to yourself. They don’t demand constant noise. They understand that silence is restorative.

Below is an excerpt from my new book, It’s So Super F❤️cking Important (And You’re Not Invited).

Think about your typical day. If you are like most people, you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone. Then you fix coffee or breakfast, then check social media, then emails. Then perhaps you go to work or school or some other preplanned activity. After all that, you are ready to decompress. So, you retreat to your home, or go for happy hour, or work out at the gym, or something else that steals your attention. Then it’s time for TV and more social media. Or perhaps a book or a movie, something else to distract you from … what exactly? Perhaps boredom, you might say. Because without doing all these things you’d have nothing to do, right? And the kicker of it all is that nothing is what you need more than anything else!

Our society thrives in a constant state of distraction. Solo time isn’t something that’s necessarily embraced. It’s certainly not built into our busy twenty-four-hour-a-day culture. So solitude must be created and scheduled.

Most of us are so conditioned to constant noise and distraction that stillness feels foreign, even uncomfortable. That’s okay. It takes time to adjust. It takes gentleness. The exercises below are designed to help create space within you—space for emotions to move, and space for something genuinely transformative to enter.

Exercise One: Quiet the Mind Through Meditation
Meditation doesn’t have to be complicated—it’s simply the practice of sitting still and paying attention. Sit comfortably (on a cushion, chair, or the floor), and close your eyes or soften your gaze. Begin by focusing on your breath—the inhale, the exhale—letting it flow naturally. When your mind wanders (and it will), don’t judge it. Instead, become curious. Watch your thoughts as though you were a stranger eavesdropping on a conversation across the room. Let the thoughts pass through like a series of clouds. You don’t need to push them away—just observe. The goal isn’t to stop thinking. It’s to recognize that you are not your thoughts. You are the silent awareness behind them. Start with just a few minutes a day, then let the practice grow from there. Over time, this simple act will help you feel more grounded, more spacious, and more connected to yourself.

Exercise Two: Gratitude Meditation
Gratitude is one of the most transformative tools you can bring into your meditation practice. Once you’ve settled into stillness, gently turn your attention to what you’re thankful for. This could be anything: the warmth of sunlight on your skin, the support of a friend, a safe place to live, delicious food to eat, or just the reality of being alive. Let each moment of appreciation rise organically, like a quiet offering from the heart. Don’t just name them—feel them. Let gratitude move through you, softening resistance, easing the mind, and creating space for clarity to emerge. With consistency, this simple act reshapes your perspective. You begin to see the richness already present in your life. You become rooted in presence instead of preoccupied with what’s missing. Gratitude becomes more than a feeling— it becomes a way of being.

Exercise Three: Sun Therapy
One of the simplest, most powerful practices for introverts is sun therapy—just sitting gently in the sunshine, eyes closed, letting the light soak into your skin. It’s a way of meditating without effort, clearing the mind without trying to control it. Find a calm spot, tilt your face toward the warmth, and let the sun do its work. Feel the light move through you, dissolving tension, chasing off the clutter of thoughts, settling you back into your body. For introverts, who naturally absorb more from their surroundings, the modern world can often feel like an overwhelming flood of stimulation. Sun therapy offers a simple, natural way to decompress and reset. The warmth soothes the nervous system, settles the mental noise, and restores the innate sense of peace that introverts crave but rarely find in a noisy, demanding world. It’s a form of nourishment that asks nothing from you—no roles, no performance— only that you be. A few minutes like this can leave you lighter, clearer, and more connected to your true self. Just you and the sun, exactly as you are.

Exercise Four: Vision Boarding
Start by picking up a poster board and gathering a stack of old magazines—you can often find them for free at doctor’s offices, coffee shops, or waiting rooms if you ask. Then set aside a few quiet hours to flip through the pages and cut out anything that resonates with you. Words, phrases, images, symbols, whatever. Don’t overthink it. Just follow your gut. Choose visuals that reflect what you’d love to bring into your life. Once you’ve finished cutting everything out, use a glue stick to arrange the pieces on your poster board in whatever way feels right to you. There’s no wrong way to do it— just follow your intuition and create a layout that speaks to you. I like to do this once a year, usually around the New Year, as a way to gather and anchor my intentions. Once finished, place your vision board in your sacred space, or somewhere you’ll see it every day. I like to make mine part of my morning meditation practice; I take a few moments to sit with it, reflect, and reset my focus. This isn’t about making a frameable piece of art—it’s about tapping into intuition, aligning and realigning yourself with the life you want to cultivate.

Exercise Five: Journaling
Grab a pen and paper and just start writing—even if there’s no sense to it, even if it’s just a stream of thoughts, nonsense, or scribbles. If you draw, pick up a pencil and move it across the page—the only task is to not overthink what it’s supposed to be. The key is to engage in whatever you naturally do when there are no distractions. At first, your mind may resist. You may feel restless, impatient, or frustrated that nothing profound is happening. But that’s part of the process. Creativity and insight don’t arrive on demand. They unfold when given the space to breathe. You’re not just writing. You’re relearning how to listen—to yourself, to inspiration, to the quiet intelligence that exists beyond the noise of daily life.

If you don’t know what to write, simply note how you feel. What emotions come up? What thoughts refuse to leave? What does your body crave—stillness or movement? Follow that instinct. If you feel stuck, try asking yourself open-ended questions:

• What am I curious about?
• What keeps me up at night?
• What would I create if nobody else was watching?
• What have I been avoiding?
• What do I need to say?

Write down whatever comes, no matter how trivial or nonsensical it seems. Let go of the need for immediate meaning. The work isn’t about forcing inspiration; it’s about showing up, nurturing the experience, and allowing something more evocative to emerge over time.

Above all, trust the process. Your mind will try to pull you away—taunting you with the illusion that nothing’s happening, that this is a waste of time, that you should check your phone or get back to “real life.” Acknowledge those thoughts. Thank your mind for its concerns, but don’t follow them. Stay here. Stay open. Let something barely perceptible beneath the surface begin to emerge.

The more you show up in your sacred space, the more the intrusive thoughts will subside. Ideas come into focus. Intuition will strengthen. Soon, what once felt distant—creativity, clarity, inspiration—will become freely and wholly accessible.

Final Thoughts

If this excerpt resonated with you, I explore these ideas much more deeply in my new book, It’s So Super F❤️cking Important (And You’re Not Invited): The Introvert’s Path To Creative Genius

The answers were never outside you. They were waiting in the silence.

I will figure it out.

Sometimes it feels like life places challenges in your path on purpose — simply to see what you’re made of. Every hard moment asks the same question: will you shrink, or will you grow? Most people choose shrinking. They avoid risk. They avoid discomfort. They build lives designed around safety instead of aliveness, and slowly, quietly, they trade living for surviving.

But the people who design lives that feel true do something different. They lean into uncertainty. They allow themselves to be misunderstood, criticized. They take chances, knowing that even if everything collapses, they can rebuild. That kind of trust in yourself changes everything.

Every meaningful leap in human history started with someone being called unreasonable. Flying through the sky. Talking across continents. Exploring space. Building the internet. None of that came from playing it safe. It came from people who refused to accept the limits handed to them, who didn’t ask for permission, who acted before the world agreed. If you only live according to what feels practical and approved, you’ll end up with the same life as everyone else — a predictable routine, a calendar full of obligations, and a quiet ache you can’t quite explain.

Sometimes you have to move before it makes sense. Sometimes you have to act without guarantees. Sometimes you have to trust your inner compass more than “agreed upon realities.” That’s not recklessness. That’s choosing to actually live.

Most people default to No. No to opportunities. No to change. No to discomfort. No to unfamiliar paths. Then they wonder why their lives feel small. Life expands when you say yes — yes to experiences, yes to learning as you go, yes to imperfect beginnings, yes to showing up even when you feel unready. You don’t find your way by waiting until everything feels safe. You find your way by stepping forward while your knees are still shaking.

Stop standing at the edge testing the waters.

Jump in.

People often wait for confidence before they move, but confidence doesn’t come first. Movement does. Courage is built through doing. Every uncomfortable step strengthens something inside you. Every scary choice makes the next one easier. The more you act, the more you trust yourself. The more you trust yourself, the freer you become. Thinking, calculating, and over-planning will never replace good old fashioned action. At some point, you have to stop rehearsing your life and start living it.

You don’t have to accept the default script. You don’t have to keep taking directions from people who’ve never been where you want to go. You’re allowed to question everything. You’re allowed to build a life centered on freedom and experiences instead of possessions. Break old patterns. Challenge inherited beliefs. Create your own.

The goal is to wake up in a life that feels like yours.

Most people are so focused on avoiding danger that they forget to live. Don’t make that mistake. Take the long way. Follow what feels alive. Trust that you’ll figure it out. Courage comes to those who move, not to those who wait.

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

Not someday. Not when everything feels right.

Now.

And if any of this feels familiar — the restlessness, the quiet pull toward something more, the sense that life is meant to be lived differently — I wrote I Don’t Want to Grow Up as a reflection on my own journey. It’s the story of stepping away from routines that didn’t fit, learning to trust my inner compass, and slowly designing a life around freedom, time, and experiences.

It’s simply my path, shared honestly. I hope it helps you find yours.

Those things are real. But they’re not the root.

The deeper, more universal crisis is harder to measure, harder to argue about online, and harder to fix with policy:

Disconnection.

Socially. Spiritually. Emotionally. Existentially.

People feel disconnected from meaning, from time, from themselves, and from each other. It shows up as chronic exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. As anxiety that hums quietly beneath everyday life. As a constant sense of being behind—behind on work, behind on life, behind on some invisible timeline everyone else seems to understand.

Working more, feeling less fulfilled. Doom-scrolling instead of living. Having more conveniences than any generation in history, yet feeling strangely empty. Being “connected” online while feeling alone in real life.

We were sold a version of success built on productivity, consumption, and status. More hours. More output. More upgrades. More achievements.

But the nervous system can’t live there forever.

So people end up trapped in what I’d call postponed living.

“I’ll be happy when things calm down.”
“I’ll slow down later.”
“I’ll start living after this season.”

Except that season never ends. There’s always another deadline, another bill, another promotion to chase, another crisis in the headlines.

Life has become something to survive instead of something to experience.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped inhabiting our days. We began rushing through them. Time became something to manage instead of something to feel. Presence became a luxury. Silence became uncomfortable. Stillness became suspicious.

We wake up already tired. We spend our best hours staring at screens. We measure our worth in productivity. We postpone joy until weekends, vacations, retirement.

Sixty-five.

As if your body, your curiosity, and your wildness are going to be waiting patiently for you then.

The tragedy is that they’ve forgotten what they’re busy for.

Because when you strip it all down, people don’t actually want more stuff. They want time. Peace. Meaning. Space to breathe. A life that feels like it belongs to them.

They want slow mornings and unhurried walks. Real conversations instead of endless texts and notifications. To feel the sun on their face without checking their phone. They want room for solitude, room for creativity, room for nature, room for simply being human.

That’s why so many of us feel a quiet pull toward mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, open skies.

It’s the body remembering what the mind forgot.

Freedom is about reclaiming presence. Solitude is where you hear yourself again. Nature is about medicine. And choosing a smaller life, with fewer obligations and more free time is about remembering.

The real crisis isn’t financial. Isn’t political. Isn’t even technological.

It’s that millions of people are living lives that no longer feel alive.

And until we address that—until we start designing lives around time instead of money, presence instead of productivity, and meaning instead of momentum—we’ll keep treating symptoms while ignoring the source.

Because at the end of the day, what people are really searching for is reconnection.

With themselves. With each other. With the living world. With the simple, radical experience of being here now.

That’s the crisis.

And it’s also the invitation.

To slow down. To step outside. To build a life you don’t need to escape from.

This is why nature keeps calling to us.

Through the way your shoulders drop when you step into the woods. The way your breath deepens near the ocean. The way your thoughts finally slow beneath open skies.

Nature isn’t just something beautiful to visit on weekends.

It’s trying to bring us back home.

Every trail, every river, every sunrise is an invitation to remember who you were before life became a series of obligations and notifications. Before time was something to outrun. Before you forgot how to simply be.

That’s what my book, Nature’s Silent Message, explores.

Nature as teacher. A mirror. A quiet guide reminding us that we were never meant to live disconnected from the living, breathing world outside.

If you’ve been feeling burned out, restless, or quietly lost… if something inside you keeps longing for open space, stillness, and meaning—this book was written for you.

Because beneath all the noise of modern life, there is still a deeper intelligence gently calling you back.

Nature has been speaking the whole time.

You just have to listen.

I receive many emails from people who feel lost early in life—young people searching for meaning before the world has hardened them. But occasionally, I hear from someone who has lived long enough to know that the real tests come later.
After love.
After family.
After you’ve already built a life—and then watched it disappear.

The letter below is one of those.

Shared anonymously.

A Reader Writes

Hi Scott,

I recently came across your work again and felt compelled to reach out.

I realized I had read one of your books years ago, and seeing your writing resurface in my life felt less like coincidence and more like timing. You speak to something many people spend their entire lives searching for—often in the wrong places, and for the wrong reasons.

My own journey into the outdoors began early. As a child, when the world around me felt unstable and overwhelming, I found refuge wandering through farm fields, river woods, and eventually the mountains. By the time I was eighteen, I had already witnessed more death, tragedy, and family hardship than any kid should have to carry.

Those landscapes became my safe haven.

What I didn’t know then was that my greatest challenges were still ahead of me.

Later in life, I reached a point where I questioned whether a loving God even existed at all. That question became unavoidable after the sudden loss of my youngest son. That grief brought me to the brink of self-destruction. Once again, I took to the hills—not to escape, but to survive.

Through that surrender, something shifted. I came to understand that God does exist—but not in the narrow definitions offered by convention or doctrine. My relationship with the divine has been shaped by experience.

More recently, I lost my wife. And now the path ahead feels altered again. There is no map. No clear direction. Only a continuation of the journey itself.

I admire the way you live—not because it looks like a dream, but because it looks honest. You live life on your own terms. I believe our creative gifts—yours through writing, mine through photography—are meant to help make life a little more bearable for others.

Thank you for what you share. I look forward to reading more.

My Response

Thank you for writing—and for trusting me with something this tender.

Some lives are shaped by gentle unfolding.
Others are forged in fire.

Yours reads like the latter.

What stands out to me most is not the magnitude of your losses—though they are immense—but the way you responded to them. Again and again, when life became unbearable, you didn’t numb yourself, harden your heart, or turn away from the world. You returned to it. You went back to the fields, the river woods, the mountains. Back to what was real when everything else felt impossible to understand.

That’s instinct.

Many people search their entire lives for God in buildings, books, and borrowed beliefs, never realizing that what they’re actually longing for is presence. A felt sense of belonging to something larger than their pain. Nature has always offered that without asking us to explain it.

You’re right—whatever God is, it doesn’t fit neatly inside language or tradition. And perhaps it was never meant to. Perhaps it’s meant to be experienced instead: in grief, in silence, in beauty, in surrender.

The loss of a child is a fracture that never fully heals. The loss of a partner reshapes the future in ways no one can prepare for. When those things happen, the old map dissolves. And yet—you named something important: this is life. Not a straight line. Not a destination. But an ongoing act of navigation without guarantees.

What gives me hope in reading your words is this: even now, you’re still oriented toward the light. You’re still creating. Still offering your gifts. Still trying, in your own quiet way, to ease the suffering of others.

That matters more than you know.

At the end of the day, none of us are meant to walk this path alone. We’re just walking each other home—sometimes side by side, sometimes years apart, sometimes through words written across great distances.

I’m grateful you’re here. The world needs people who have been broken open and chose to remain gentle anyway.

Happy wanderings,
Scott

A Closing Thought

If you felt something stir while reading this—if parts of it felt uncomfortably familiar—you’re not alone.

I wrote WILDERNESS, THE GATEWAY TO THE SOUL for people who sense that life is deeper, stranger, and more meaningful than the roles we’re handed. For those who have been shaped by solitude, grief, nature, or quiet rebellion. For anyone who knows, deep down, that there must be another way to live—one rooted in presence rather than performance.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further, the book is available here: scottstillmanblog.com

And if you have a question, a story, or a reflection of your own, you’re welcome to write to me. I often share and respond to reader letters here—anonymously. Sometimes the most personal stories are the ones that help others feel less alone.

We’re all still finding our way.

Submissions

When life drags on to the point where we start thinking, Is this all there is?, we’ve reached the end of the road, exhausted all our skill sets. The solution here is simple—take another road, learn something new. It doesn’t have to be an extreme sport or daring endeavor, it just needs to stimulate your brain in new ways. And it needs to be difficult, uncomfortable, awkward—like anything worthwhile you’ve ever learned. The gold is in the floundering.

We need the chance to fumble, flounder, fall flat on our faces. We need to experience “beginners mind.” As adults we get so caught up in our egos that we’re afraid of being bad at anything. We take ownership in such limiting beliefs as, I’m no good at painting, or I have no sense of balance. How many toddlers say, I’m no good at walking, then go about crawling the rest of their lives? It all comes down to desire. I recently saw a video of a skateboarder with no legs! And he was incredible! Each of us has the capacity to learn what we want to learn. But we have to want it, and we have to want it badly.

Life loses its meaning when we close off the world. When we get proficient at our chosen skills we become know-it-alls and life’s magic slowly begins to fade. Learning puts us back into the dance. What would it be like to see through the eyes of a child? What if you could see everything objectively, without prejudice? What if you opened your mind to the infinite sea of opportunity that surrounds us all?

The fact is… life does not lose its meaning. We do. The world becomes unrecognizable when we refuse to evolve with it. Deeper we crawl into our caves, blocking out all light except for what streams through a glowing rectangle in the center of the room. We become hypnotized by news, propaganda, biased facts. Our world becomes filled with endless problems because that’s all we can see. We forget that all we must do is step outside, feel the sunshine on our face, the wind in our hair, and say:

My God, where have I been?

Look at these arms—they still work!

Look at these legs—they still walk!

Look at this heart—it still beats!

Look at that sun—it still shines!

From my book: Oceans Of My Mind

They’re exhausted before they’ve even begun.
Overwhelmed by choice, yet paralyzed by uncertainty.
Surrounded by information, yet starved for meaning.

This generation came of age during economic instability, a global pandemic, rising costs of living, constant online comparison, and a culture that demands clarity before self-knowledge has had time to develop. They’re told to figure it out while the ground beneath them keeps shifting. It’s no wonder so many feel lost, anxious, and unsure whether the future holds anything worth striving toward.

I receive emails like the one below more often than you might expect. Different names. Different details. The same ache beneath the words.

What you’re about to read is one such exchange—shared anonymously.

It isn’t extraordinary. And that’s precisely the point.

A Letter From a Lost Young Man

Hi Scott,

I wasn’t sure if I should write, but I’ve reached a point where staying quiet feels worse than speaking up.

I’m in my mid-twenties and feel completely stuck. Over the last couple of years, I’ve lost a job, watched relationships fall apart, and found myself back at home with no clear direction. My health—both mental and physical—has made everything harder, and without work or structure, my thoughts tend to spiral.

I look around and everyone else seems to have their lives figured out. Careers. Plans. Momentum. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m standing still, wondering what I’m supposed to do next and why I can’t seem to move forward.

At one point, I tried to break the pattern by doing something drastic. I strapped on a backpack and started walking—mile after mile—just to feel like I was moving again. For a while, it helped. The simplicity of walking gave me clarity I hadn’t felt in a long time. But eventually the walk ended, and the questions were still there.

I don’t expect answers. I’m not asking you to fix anything. I think I just needed some direction from someone who has lived unconventionally and understands what it’s like to feel lost and restless and unsure how to begin again.

Thank you for your work. It’s helped me put words to things I couldn’t explain before.

—

My Response

I’d like to cut to the chase and offer some thoughts here straightaway.

First, let me say this: the walking mattered.
Even if it didn’t solve everything, it was an instinct in the right direction. Movement is medicine. When the mind is stuck, the body often knows what to do first. Walking stripped your life down to essentials—one step, one breath, one day. That wasn’t running away. That was listening.

Now, here’s how I’d think about what comes next.

STEP 1:
Get really clear about your long dream. If money and obstacles were no problem, what would you do? This is your meaning and your life’s purpose. Write it down. It doesn’t have to be perfect or permanent—but it needs to stay at the forefront of your thinking.

STEP 2:
Take action. Massive action.
This means getting a job—any job—and starting to work toward that dream. Save money. Create structure. A job will take your mind off your troubles and is 100% necessary for your mental health. There is nothing worse than sitting at home thinking about all your problems. That only amplifies them.

Absorb yourself in the work. Find joy in working for the sake of work itself. I’ve worked many jobs that had little to no meaning on their own. I worked simply to make money to fund my true life’s purpose.

From here on out, see yourself as self-employed, even while you’re working a job. You are in the business of fulfilling your dreams, and you will do whatever it takes to see them through.

Action breeds action. Once you start moving again—this time with intention—you’ll begin to notice the breadcrumbs, and things will start working out. But it is up to you to take the first step.

You already proved something important by walking:
you don’t freeze when things get hard—you move.

Now it’s time to move again, deliberately.

Get out there and make it happen.

I hope this helps. May you stay steadfast in the pursuit of your mental health and well-being, and in living a life full of joy and passion.

Best wishes,
Scott

A Final Note

If you’re reading this and recognize yourself in that letter, know this: you are not alone, and you are not broken. Feeling lost doesn’t mean you’ve failed—it often means you’ve outgrown a life that was never meant to fit you.

I wrote I Don’t Want To Grow Up for people like this reader. For the ones who feel pressured to choose a life before they’ve had the chance to understand themselves. For those who sense there must be another way to live—one built around freedom, curiosity, movement, and meaning rather than fear and obligation.

If this post resonated with you, that book may speak to you too.

Have a Question of Your Own?

If you’re navigating something similar—or wrestling with questions about work, meaning, burnout, freedom, or simply how to keep going—you’re welcome to write to me.

I regularly answer reader questions here on the blog, and submissions can be shared anonymously if you prefer. Sometimes the question you’re afraid to ask is the exact one someone else needs to read.

Write Scott Stillman