Fantasy and Delusion

You dream of making your life better. You crave forward direction. You’re aware that on some level, you are mysteriously dissatisfied with something within you. History is replete with people who have lived incredible lives, and you know that right now, out there in this wide world, many people are living out every dream they ever set out for themselves. You wonder why such a person couldn’t be you, and it’s a valid thought. So you dream while you look out the window and imagine the outcome of a series of events that would arise from you taking any first step towards this final vision. The places you could go, the house you could buy, the family you could raise with the partner of your dreams. The future is nebulous and you could be anything, or at the very least, anything more than what you are now.

These daydreams are like little phantom bricks that you use to construct houses in the city of your mind. Each brick builds upon the next until you find yourself with new dreams contingent on the original yet-unrealized dream. Fantasy springs to life. You finish a grueling day at work and on your way home you dream about how much life will change when you finally complete law school and get a six figure income. There’s a sweet idea you play over and over in your head—the day that you drop a set of car keys into your father’s hand and tell him it’s his new car. You imagine the look on his face and how satisfying that feeling will be… Next Monday, you tell yourself… Next Monday is when you’ll finally go down and register in classes at your local college. When you think about it, it’s kind of a funny thing what we just did there, isn’t it? We’re imagining the outcome of step 500 when we haven’t even begun step 1. We’re living and breathing off an idea and nothing more, using a fantasy as an attempt to assuage our discontent towards our life. Next Monday may as well be never, so what possible satisfaction are we hoping to get from imagining these things? I think Voltaire had it right when he said that ‘illusion is the first of all pleasures’.  

Now I want to take a step back here and quickly discuss quantum physics. Don’t worry, I promise that it will relate perfectly to our little fantasy problem here. So, here it goes: Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that deals with the very small particles that make up our universe. In this branch of physics there is a term called superposition. What it means is that a quantum system such as an electron or a photon can exist in multiple states simultaneously until it is observed or measured. Upon measurement, the system ‘collapses’ into one of its possible states, which is a process known as a wave function collapse. And it’s this collapse that determines the definitive state of the particle from that point onward. To illustrate, imagine you’re flipping a coin, and while it’s spinning in the air, it alternates between heads and tails as a coin is wont to do. But imagine for a second that instead this coin now behaves as though it were a subatomic particle. In that scenario the coin wouldn’t be switching back and forth between heads and tails. Rather, while it is airborne it would exist in a state where it is both heads and tails simultaneously. If you could freeze time and look at the coin mid-air, you wouldn’t see just heads or tails—you’d see it as both at once. This state is known as superposition. Once you catch the coin and open your palm to see the result, the superposition (wave function) collapses, and the coin ‘decides’ which side it’s on, giving you your answer. Now imagine that there are many types of coins with many more sides than just two and you begin to approximate something akin to how superpositions are in the real world. And that depending on factors like polarization, spatial modes, energy levels, quantum optics, or entanglement, these states can exist in virtually infinite configurations. However, once the wave function collapses, they assume a definite and real state. Okay cool.

The reason I’m telling you any of this is because I’ve noticed an interesting parallel between quantum superpositions and people’s futures. Just like how our coin is in multiple states until caught, day dreams, or at least the potential results of daydreams, exist in a multitude of simultaneous states until they are lived out. Now suddenly daydreaming about signing up for law classes seems to resemble our quantum coin flip. Initiating the vision of going to register is a lot like tossing the coin in the air, in that by going you are spawning a near countless number of potential outcomes. You could be hit by a car on the way there, meet an old friend in the registrar’s office, or even wind up quitting after a week of classes because you realized you never actually wanted to be a lawyer at all—you just wanted to make money. And just like how you cannot know the results of your coin toss until you catch it, you cannot know what future lies in store for you until you actually go and sign up. In this sense, we can almost envision that every lived moment is like a device that measures superpositions and collapses them on a second by second basis. And so loaning from the quantum terminology here, you could say that a day dream represents a type of ‘superpotential’ of the future. A state of infinite possibilities that must be transmuted into one singular outcome by means of action…

Now imagine the sheer number of superpotentials that you will collapse along the way to dropping those car keys in your father’s hand. Each one representing a totally new rendition of the universe’s unfolding, and also your subconscious’ interpretation of it. You confront the new and with it transform, which transforms the world around you. And yet somehow, you believe that in five years you will be the same person that you are now, and that life will go according to your neat little plan. But intrinsically we all understand that the future cannot be interpreted from the present, and just because you told yourself that you want something, does not mean that you will feel that way when you do or don’t get it. In fact, oftentimes your subconscious’ reaction to the world around you is as unpredictable as the future itself. Which means that despite being blind to your nature and deaf to the future, we still want to insist on using our ever-outdated model of understanding to predict a world that is by strict default completely shut away from us. 

Indeed, it seems to be a rule of the pysche that our ideas of the future are based on the most positive interpretation of all of the potential wave collapses that build up to our ultimate dreams. In other words, our concept of the future is often naive and optimistic. We expect everything to work out for us every step of the way, and play out extravagent scenarios in our heads of things that will happen once we find our throne at the peak of the mountain. Or in many people’s cases, they expect everything to *not* work out for them as is the case in the anti-fantasy. This is a life spent in worry and trepidation, endlessly catastrophizing about the things that are sure to go wrong. They believe that because life is hard, their point of view is more realistic and grounded. But make no mistake that both perspectives are equally wrong, because both perspectives are based in how we want to see the world, not how the world actually is. I will explore this idea more later. 

For now, I just want to point out that there is nothing inherently wrong with fantasies, as they provide crucial glimpses behind the curtain into your true self. The problem, as with most things in life, arises when these fantasties are met with inaction. This is because we humans have a proclivity to incorporate unlived fantasies into our identities. We feel good about the positive outcome of our potential journeys and start to take a sense of comfort in the surety of our futures. We assume it will happen ‘one day’ and so a weird part of our brain starts to feel like it is happening right now. An old acquaintance asks what you’ve been up to lately and you respond that you are ‘registering’ in law classes. They feign being impressed and you get to pat yourself on the back for something that you have not lifted a finger to actualize. It’s a form of self-deceit and internal evasion as it allows you to avoid confronting the fear of taking that first step. A fear born from the inherent understanding that reality will not be what you make it out to be. 

I like to see reality as a machine that takes ideas, philosophies, and identities, and shreds them up and spits them out as a heap of garbage on the floor. It bears no fools, and cares nothing about your understanding of it. But if you’re lucky, in that pile of optimism *or* pessimism now sitting in a cold pile, there will be fragments of wisdom that you can sift through and incorporate back into yourself. But people love to hold onto their ideas, and their philosophies, and their identities because if not confronted by reality, they can maintain them to keep their ego intact. If you don’t show your painting to anyone, you can call it a masterpiece and you will be right—only you’ll be right to an audience of one person. For many that is enough in the interim, but they know that deep down that it is also insufficient. Still, they guard themselves from the violent confrontation with reality because ignorance is bliss as much as it’s also fear. People may wish to call it laziness but laziness is when you don’t want to take out the trash right now. It is an entirely different thing to put off altering your life for weeks, months, or years at a time while still clinging to this morcel of self delusion because the becoming of yourself is just so terrifying to you…  

So can we call this delusion? That is, can we say that delusion is the phenomenon of identifying with the *intention* of realizing a collection of superpotentials, of which the final outcome is contingent on every step of the process working out for you in the most positive way? To put it in less theoretical terms, you’re identifying with the end of a journey that you haven’t even begun, and are justifying this good feeling to yourself with the mere intention of beginning… We all do this, of course. We torture ourselves in bed at night with the knowledge of a passing life and a life that we have never truly lived to its potential, and so we dream of sparkling gold and vague promises. Through these images of the future energy and life spring forth, but the danger is that so too is energy and life sucked away from our current existence as a result. Our dissatisfaction with the present has been simmering in the pot, and these fantasies brings it to a boil. Tomorrow will be the day for good and hard work. Then it will be the next day, and the next. And before you know it, through the inception of the dream and its consequent inaction, we have thus made the present moment insufficient and the future something that will not and cannot be. The failure of actioning upon our fantasies transforms them into a wellspring of depression, for which the only cure is the fantasy itself. Our unrealized superpotential undulates between oppressive desire, guilt, and the hope of resolution to our ineffable dissatisfaction. This is the plight of living in your head.

Act on your fantasy now and you may find that it becomes your reality, offering everything that you ever dreamed of. Though this is unlikely, and there is a much larger chance that despite the dream’s realization, the original feeling that instigated the fantasy in the first place will slowly find its way back into your psyche. You will wonder why you are still not happy and fulfilled, and it is here that you will encounter disillusionment. You may panic, or even feel a sense of dismay, but trust me when I say that experiencing this feeling is a very positive thing. Disappointment is the hidden language of the future, and disillusionment in many cases is much more valuable than success. Attempting to ignore these things and contort reality to fit your expectations is a sure path to ambiguous suffering. But before I explain the benefits of disillusionment, let’s discuss the fundamental forms in which it tends to manifest.

1. Self disillusionment

This is the type of disillusionment that arises when you get halfway through writing your novel and realize that you don’t actually enjoy writing. It’s what happens when you’re in your first year of nursing school and the thought of doing a job that entails cleaning up human waste for the rest of your life makes you want to jump out of a window. It’s what happens when you’re standing in a club bobbing your head to the music and suddenly realize that you haven’t had fun in a club once in your entire life. In essence, it’s the outcome of your nature rejecting the preordained path that you had chosen to walk down. In such circumstances, the perfectly calibrated individual accepts disillusionment as suddenly as it occurs and moves on to another path. He peeks over the edge of the well, sees that it is empty, and leaves without a second’s hesitation. There are other wells out there. Ones brimming with fresh and clear water. He sets off to find them instead. But we are not perfectly calibrated individuals, and for a multitude of reasons, we tend to spend far too long, if not our entire lives, putting a bucket down a well that we knew from the outset was as dry as a desert bone. Often these reasons are of a worldly and extrinsic nature. The nursing student wishes to quit right then and there, but the ramifications of this act on her home life, expected responsibilities, and financial stability rein her back into an existence of self-inflicted misery. Fear of the future and fear of judgment induce her to take this newfound disillusionment and swallow it down. 

And if not worldly factors, then it is an over attachment to an artificially forged identity that leads people down the same path. Walking away from the well might harm their image or self value. This is especially true for those who spent a very long time living in their fantasy prior to embarking down the path. Take the writer, for example, who realizes halfway through his novel that he detests the thought of writing another word. Over the course of years, he has forged an identity among his peers that he is a writer. When people think about what he is up to, they probably assume that he is writing. He himself has taken on this identity, and when planning for weekend activities, he knows that writing must (arbitrarily) take one of the top spots. For him to walk away from the well would put him at a staggering loss of direction and pride. He would have to reforge his identity not just with himself, but with everyone around him. He would have to come to terms with the fact that he spent years on something that he thinks never should have spent years on. This is a daunting task. So being a human, he stuffs his disillusionment down and forces himself to live a lie instead. This lie then manifests into a fantasy within itself, but one of salvation from the reality of his own soul. He convinces himself that everything will change once he finally finishes the novel and people start reading it. That perhaps he will become an overnight success, and the reputation and money that spawned the dream in the very first place would come and wash away all of his doubt. But this will never happen, because even if he were to finish his book (which he probably never will), any success he found would simply compound the pressure and expectation to do more of something that he never wanted to do in the first place. His hate for writing would amplify, and the lie would become an egregious mockery of his existence. 

Many people do this. 

Don’t do this.

When you recognize that the well is dry, pack up and leave immediately.

Sometimes a dry well can be spotted at a glance, but this is seldom the case. What is more likely is that you will have to spend a good amount of time learning the process of your new endeavor, getting good at it, and passing over the initial hurdle of amateurity in order to see whether or not this new thing truly is for you. You cannot tell just by thinking about it, and just as likely, you cannot tell while you suck at it either. A drummer cannot pick up her drum sticks, hit them against the snare a few times, and then say that drumming was just never her thing. Instead, she must learn the rudiments, take lessons, and perhaps join a band. Disillusionment can hit at any point along the way. It may be after her first lesson that she realizes she never wants to take another, or it could just as well occur during her twentieth show. Either way, it must be pursued all the way until she hits the wall of disillusionment, otherwise she will never be sure that she sufficiently explored the path. When we don’t explore these things and instead allow them to fester over long periods of time, we are invariably struck with one of life’s bitterest questions, and that is the question ‘what if?’ What if you had just done that thing all those years ago, how much different would things be now? Who could you have become? People tend to misunderstand this insidious question, however, because it uses the same mechanism of fantasy to extrapolate a phantom reality where everything worked out for you in the best possible way as well. So that when you ask yourself ‘what if I had just written that screenplay?’ You errantly assume that it would have succeeded and you would have loved it and everything would be different today. You beat yourself up over something that in all likelihood was not going to work out in the same way that most things in your life don’t work out either. You romantasize everything that you have not done, and you downplay everything that you have. Most people believe that it’s not good enough to live a life for the sake of it. They attach expectations of great success and discovery that must be met in order to state on their deathbeds that they had sufficiently become what it meant to be themselves. 

No, what makes the question of ‘what if’ so damaging is the implication of lost discovery. There was a cavern in the labyrinth of your soul and you ignored it. You stood at the entrance and looked at it and took one step towards it, then at the last moment you turned around and ran away. It was never about the bitterness of relinquishing worldly outcomes such as fame and wealth, but rather about knowing yourself and using that knowledge to inform the rest of your life. Do you understand what I’m saying? It is not the same to go solo backpacking at 20 as it is at 40. The experience and knowledge at 20 would inform every decision and every moment for the remainder of your life. It would equip you with the understanding of how to better become yourself as you marched into the future. To shun that away because of fear is an egregious loss. It’s this that makes ‘what if’ such a dirty question. Because it means ‘what if I had been one step closer to truly being myself, who would I be right now?’ And that question of ‘who would I be’ will always trump ‘what could I have done’ because by its very nature it encompasses the unpredictability of life, eshews the notion of expected success, and is a constant factor of consideration until death. You will never stop asking ‘who would I be’ and therefore it carries itself as one of life’s most important questions. 

Quick Note: Just to clarify, these things must only be explored if they are the product of a day dream or fantasy. I am not recommending that you try every little thing under the sun to find out what you like and dislike. There must first be a calling of identity stemming from the dream. A good rule of thumb is if you think about doing something ten times, then that means you must try it or live it out.

Because of this obsession with worldly feedback to our journeys of self discovery, we become overly concerned with the idea of wasting time and consequently fall victims to the sunk cost fallacy. The idea of starting something, putting your heart into it, and then finding out that you actually don’t like the thing is a scary concept to most. They’re so trapped in comparison to others and societal expectations that to waste a month or a year on something is equivalent to throwing away a year of their life. But this is a ridiculous notion, because by putting effort into seeking disillusionment, we are simultaneously discovering that the thing we “wasted time on” is in fact one of the two possible answers to our question of what if. And the answer is no. It’s entering the cave and finding out that it’s a dead end, but you could have never hoped to find this out by standing outside. If the question of what if were to ever pop into your mind again, you would easily answer it and with the same step simultaneously avoid the piercing arrow of regret.  

And as most people do not understand this principle, you will get much push-back from those around you for starting and abandoning so many projects. They will interpret it as flightiness and a lack of resolve. But they themselves are the fools here, because while you are getting one step closer to discovering your true passion and self, they are stuffing their disillusionment down, living a lie, and saying ‘that’s just life’. Unfortunately this attitude was likely inculcated into your mind as well from a young age, which is why you and everyone else stick around dead passion for so long. You must be the one to resist it. Hear me that there is a great courage in putting your damn best into seeking something and abandoning it in spite of the world.

Now you may be wondering how one can differentiate disillusionment from self doubt. Naturally, when moving on from old identities, it is a common apprehension to think you are quitting something too soon. But understand that quitting will reveal your true level of interest on a much deeper level than you’re capable of recognizing consciously. It may take a while, but if you find yourself coming back to the thought of the thing that you quit, it means that you must return to it until the job is done. Otherwise, congratulations, you have dropped dead weight.

2. World disillusionment 

This is the type of disillusionment that happens when you finally finish your first album and lay awake at night excited about the hundreds of thousands of listens you’ll get over the next three months. You imagine which recording label is going to reach out to you, and the parties you’ll be invited to now that you’re a successful musician. Then a month goes by and you are dismayed at the fact that your music got less than four listens and they were all from people you asked to listen to it. It’s the same disillusionment that happens when you graduate from business school, excited to climb the corporate ladder because of your hard work and inherent genius, only to find yourself working at a clerical position where your boss wants nothing more than to keep you under his thumb. This is quite different from self-disillusionment because in this case, you may actually be spot on with your identity and passion. You could be fully aware that music is the thing that you want to do for the rest of your life and you are filled with an infinite desire to create. But you realize that passion and love do not equate to success by any stretch of the imagination. You learn that although albums like OK Computer and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts were almost passed on, there is an otherwise extremely good reason for why industry gatekeeping exists. You realize that your album too has been added to the unfathomable torrent of mediocre trash that comprises the amateur music scene. And that without a very strong sifting mechanism, actually good music would be drowned out by your music. Even worse, you learn that agents and recording companies have used sophisticated statistical analysis models in an effort to min-max their profit to risk ratios, and that by doing so have created a superficial market that mostly caters to the largest common denominator. You see that although this music is passionless, derivative and lacking any true creative spark, it is still what sells. And because of that, you witness countless of your fellow ‘musicians’ sell their souls in a heartbeat for just a chance at attaining a crumb of the capitalist musical pie. Your vision of success is obliterated like a snowball against a fast moving truck (reality). This disillusionment is real and bitter. But it is simultaneously a major insight into the workings of how things really are. Because in order for you to become a successful musician, you must do so first by living life on life’s terms. You must cast your naive dreams to the wind and learn to play the game. You must expand your understanding of what constitutes success, or at least what it means in this industry. But this requires growth, and a deeper understanding of not just society, but of human nature. For you must understand that these systems, however corrupt and imbecilic, are the constructs of people just like you. 

The most common response to these revelations is denial. The individual fails to come to terms with the way things are and insists that it is actually they who are right. They adopt the pernicious habit of analyzing the world through normative statements, declaring how things should and could be— of course if only the world wasn’t so messed up and full of evil, stupid people. In turn, they become convinced that the world isn’t ready for their genius of expression or that they were simply born at the wrong time. In essence, it is a defiance to the world, and a denial of their own disillusionment. By doing this they allow themselves to maintain the framework of their correct worldview, which so happens to be a worldview that only they understand. 

The thing is, oftentimes these people are actually right to some extent about their criticisms. The world is far from a fair and righteous place, and rampant corruption indeed seems to be at the heart of most collective human endeavors. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t actually matter because railing at the world is going to change it about as much as going vegan is going to close down slaughterhouses. What matters is that you must understand the system, why it exists the way that it does, and what that says about human nature. Once you understand it, and can succeed in the game, then, and only then, can you become capable of making substantial change in the world. But it takes courage to admit that the system you tried to love ended up spitting you through the grates of a street sewer because you were naive. It requires courage to accept the cold bitch-slap of reality on one cheek and then turn the other for another slap. People are often inimical to your interests, motivated to help only if it entails a benefit to themselves, and are largely unconcerned with the well-being of anyone but numero uno. Welcome to reality. This IS the system and you ARE a part of it. The sooner you can come to terms with this and get back to your feet the better. 

3. Relational disillusionment (bonus)

People are not your projections of who you want them to be.  

4. Life disillusionment (bonus 2)

Sometimes life sucks for no reason. 

The Role of the Subconscious

Novel situations draw out reactions from you that you could have never guessed about yourself. You learn about yourself by engaging reality. It is an instant feedback loop that informs your perception of self, and consequently your perception of the world around you as well. This means that there is a two-fold constant veil of mystery that you confront automatically on a daily basis. You do not know yourself or the world, you can only have vague approximations of them as you move through your life. The corollary statement would then be that the only way to answer a daydream is to act it out. Let’s not parse words here: Every facet of reality must pass through your subconscious to be interpreted. Most of the time these interpretations will fall in line with what you expect of yourself, but sometimes they will catch you completely off guard and upend your understanding of being. Yet people, through their anxiety and fear, insist on attempting to interpret these facets of reality from within the sanctuary of their safespace. They predict the future and either talk themselves into things or out of things to maintain some illusion of control. Like earlier mentioned with reality being an idea destroying machine, people try to assume how it is that reality will interact with their ideas because that way there is a low probability of their idea being shredded to ribbons. The funny thing is that by doing this, people manufacture massive amounts of anxiety for themselves, because I suppose, at least this anxiety is something that they’re used to feeling, and a feeling, however negative, if familiar, will always be preferable to the unknown. 

Let’s say a man thinks about asking his boss for a raise, but consistently talks himself out of it because he is sure that his boss would “never approve it anyway.” Such a crime of a thought wreaks its havoc in two ways. First, and most obvious, it denies him the answer and with it denies any closure. Regardless of whether he actually got the raise, he loses his ability to move beyond something that he had set himself out to do. There is now an open query burning in his mind. Every time he thinks about his finances over the coming months, he will curse his boss and his job for underpaying him. He’ll tell himself that he needs to find new work, so he’ll revamp his resume some time “later this week”. Perhaps he rehearsed his argument a dozen times in his head, came up with an extensive list of reasons as to why he deserved the raise, and what have you. He assembled his rifle, cleaned it, loaded it, aimed it, and then put it down because he was afraid he would miss the target. The frustrating thing is that this will not go away either. He will never want to make less money, he’ll never be convinced that he doesn’t need or dserve the raise. No, all he is convinced of is that his boss is a “greedy bastard”. But the man now invites stagnation into his life. He invites a weakness of fortitude and resolve. He teaches himself that when he wants something, he should not go for it because that is a scary thing to do. This spills out into other aspects of his life, and by simply not asking for a raise he believes he deserves, he undermines everything about him. This avoidance leads to a kind of existential paralysis, where the potential to learn and grow is sacrificed at the altar of comfort.

I wish I could take this imaginary man by the shoulders and shake him violently. I wish I could tell him that to be denied the raise is more valuable than to get the raise. Because by being denied the raise his very notion of his workplace identity would be destroyed. The experience would shock his subconscious into action, and he would be forced to live. After all, how is he to know how he will react to this denial? Will he quit on the spot? Will he finally be motivated to go work on his resume? Or will he take a step back and realize that maybe he was being a little overzealous asking for the raise? And if he was being overzealous, how exactly was it that he was so wrong about his assessment of the situation beforehand? Those are all very good questions that can be answered in a single instant of action. The nebulous future where anything could happen becomes the concrete reality where that ONE thing just happened. The right foot can finally move past the left and you can be on your way. 

Taking this away from yourself is a reliable way to waste your life. How much time and energy is appropriate to waste on a single thought? The answer is very little. If you think about doing something five times, then you must act on it. It’s an incredible distinction to make that most things are not scary, you are just scared. Furthermore, it is probable that you do not even register this apprehension as fear either. When pressed, the man would be adamant that the only reason he hasn’t asked for the raise is because his boss is a prick. He simply knows him too well, and is certain that the request would never be approved. But looking back at all of the cascading events that would stem from simply asking, we can see clearly that there is literally no downside to the proposition. He will not lose his job, nothing catastrophic will happen. So objectively there is no risk to his safety, which indicates that this is not a situation that is worth being fearful over. So why the reluctance to ask? Because the identity he has built up for himself as being a good, reliable, competent worker whom everyone relies on makes him feel good. It’s one of the pillars of his self esteem that he leans on when he is feeling down. To be denied a raise would turn this pillar into a pile of ruinous dust. It would be a significant blow to his ego and his sense of place in the world. Risking this is so overwhelming that he would rather just not ask for the raise instead. He shuts his forward momentum down, ignores his right to an answer, and neglects himself all in the name of fear.  

We all predict the future in some way or another. We don’t ask people we’re attracted to out on dates, we don’t register for that yoga class we always wanted to do, we don’t quit our jobs, move to new countries, or set boundaries because we already know what will happen if we do it. The violent clash of dreams against reality is daunting because it tells you that you are not who you think you are, nor is the world what you think it is, which are often extremely disappointing discoveries. But at the same time it is pressing to remember that it liberates you from the shackles of your own mind. The construct you have been building around yourself gets turned to rubble, but afterwards you can look around you and realize that you were never the construct. You spent so much time building the construct that you forgot where you end and it begins. But when it’s lying at your feet and you realize you are still standing there, that is the moment where you gain real strength. All you ever had to do was be willing to be wrong. Without action, you are simply putting your thoughts on repeat. Realizing and forgetting and remembering the same things over and over again. Feelings go unresolved, and so too does your life. 

Final Note 

Your unconscious and subconscious minds exist in a realm that exceeds your understanding. What is right or wrong cannot be revealed through mere speculation or journaling. Finding your path involves breaking your nose against the impenetrable gray wall of disillusionment. Which means that fundamentally life MUST be lived and that the primary objective in a good life is to disappoint yourself over and over again until you understand both it and yourself. Dream and fantasize, but do not let them linger. Do not feel good about things you have not done. Do not build an identity around an idea that has not been stress tested by adversity. All you can do is act upon these promptings and accept whatever answer your subconscious gives you. Our ideas of failure in society are defunct and detrimental to the true growth of the individual. Unless you are getting massive bodily or financial harm as a result of your endeavor, the notion that you ‘failed’ must give way to the notion of growth and discovery. The takeaway here is that you know these things, but they are only valuable if you listen to the answer. Simply collapse as many wave functions as you can until you die—you never know who you will be on the other side of that, or how wise you will become.

Always treat fantasy as a deep question, and disillusionment as a gift of true wisdom.