How to Reset When You've Drifted From Yourself
Life is drifting from, and a returning to, ourselves.
At any stage, we can read it like a gauge: where am I in this moment? Now the year has slipped past its halfway point and we find ourselves on the doorstep of this key moment before we launch into the next phase. But why is it key? It’s key because it’s a natural checkpoint — a chance to see where we’ve drifted, what we’ve learned, and the small changes that can completely reset our course as move forward.
Today I want to share how breaking from my own routine showed me that these pauses can reset your course, ease the pressure of consistency, and bring you back to what feels creatively alive, even in a world dominated by screens and the tyranny of schedules.
So for me personally, I’ve just returned from a break in August — carving an arc around the north of Scotland, visiting my family scattered across the UK, and spending time care-taking someone I love.
On the one hand, I hadn’t realised how much I needed this break, or how much it would reconnect me to what I think of as the heart of living. On the other, it punctured the rhythm I’d built in the first half of the year. Driving a 5,000km loop from Berlin and back left me no time to keep up with the weekly output I’d been working so hard to upkeep. Suddenly, the consistency I’d built with this YouTube channel, my podcast, and my Substack was gone.
At first, it felt like I was letting myself down, like I’d become so attached too that modern mantra barked at us online, yapping: consistency, consistency, consistency. It felt like I was somehow drifting from myself. But the longer time went on, the more I could let go of all these demands which at the start felt like they were hunting me down. What first felt like excuses starting morphing slowly into something else. To my surprise, I found myself letting go of all the ways we’re subconsciously radically programmed by the internet; namely — The hustle-culture madness, the Silicon Valley logic, the endless demand to post post post.
What I found in that space was the opposite of what I feared. I wasn’t drifting further from myself, I was returning back to the centre of me.
As time went by, I gave myself over to things I’d ignored too long: joining the dots of constellations while a little tipsy, plunging each day into a freezing loch, feeling my mind unclench as I climbed a rock face. At first it all felt a little foreign, as if belonging to a parallel world to my over digitalised, urban existence.
But slowly I forgot all about social media, stopped checking metrics and confusing the idea of growth with online growth. At this point, I heard something in me I hadn’t heard in a long time: this capacity in its rawest form to say yes to life, to affirm all things, to remember what primary contact with nature itself feels like.
I know what we do online matters in its own way. But it is not life itself. I realised it had been covering up something I’d forgotten for too long to hear. It occured to me that the very consistency I’d worked so hard to cultivate was also suffocating the voice under my voice.
And that was hard to face. Because rebuilding a creative life in my 40s — whether with music, YouTube, podcasting or Substack — I’ve been proud of how I’m doing. Yet with it, too much of my week has become about a schedule that, if I’m honest, feels imposed rather than chosen. And the cost has been space: not just for friends and family, but for myself, for wondering, for letting realisations rise on their own — if only I stopped over-filling every neuron in my mind.
The paradox was this: what felt like being close to myself was really living under this tension — and that tension is the way the internet is built to make us feel always behind, always less, unless we keep up. But if keeping up only locks us tighter to screens, or isolates us from the people we love in the chase for the next creation — what are we really giving up?
So I wanted to share this. Because my break reminded me: if you feel you’ve drifted from yourself, the answer may not be in doing more, or exhausting yourself in another 18-hour shift chasing something that’s designed never to be caught with. Rather, you may have to find it in exactly the opposite place to where all those voices online keep telling you to look.
The best I can give you guys isn’t more output, or breaking myself against some inhuman schedule — it’s making sure I’m giving the best of myself, and that means giving myself over to life more. I don’t know yet where that leads. But I feel overflowing with a spark and energy even, that I haven’t felt in too long, at least in this primary manner. And it’s that pool inside myself — which I also know to be in you too — that I most want to share here.
So if you’re feeling out of kilter, or far from yourself, remember: that living potential is always inside you. It can be hidden for a while, but it can never be broken or defeated, because it is yours, and yours alone.
As the Zen Buddhists say: there is a face in you that you had before you were born. The only question is — are you willing to find it?
