My Search For Meaning Begins

It’s felt like a long week since my last newsletter.

There's a question that's been sitting with me for months now: How do you find real meaning in your life?

I decided to start a 28 day video series where I will explore this question from different angles every day on my Youtube channel.

You can watch those here.

There won't be perfect answers or polished conclusions. Just honest reflections as I try to navigate this terrain. This is a written version of day one.

I've been trying to piece together two things simultaneously: What creates joy for me? And what creates value for others? I think a lot of us are wrestling with both at the same time, trying to find that sweet spot where what lights us up also contributes something meaningful to the world around us.

The Distraction Trap

The world we live in makes it incredibly easy to avoid these bigger questions.

I can check sports scores endlessly. Scroll social media for hours. Stay busy with dopamine hits, one notification after another, without ever pausing to reflect on what's actually important. And if we're not careful, if we don't carve out time to step back and think, we miss things. We miss what's meaningful. What creates real value. What actually matters in the long run.

It's so easy now to isolate ourselves. To spend most of our time alone, staring at screens, moving through our days without deep connection to other people or to things outside ourselves. We can play life almost entirely in one-player mode, and before we know it, months or years have passed and we haven't really connected with anything.

The One-Player Problem

I've spent most of my life playing one-player games, and I'm only now starting to see the cost of that.

Running was individual goals, solo training sessions, pushing myself on empty tracks. Poker was one player, grinding alone for hours, my entire world reduced to decisions only I could make. Even coaching, which involves helping others, still operates through my own channels, my own programs, my own independence. I'm still fundamentally alone in how I've structured it.

The more I reflect on this pattern, the more I realise how much I've isolated myself. How easy it's been to miss real connection to people, to collaborative efforts, to things that exist beyond my own individual pursuits. And now, as AI continues to advance, I find myself asking harder questions. In three to five years, anything you can do alone, AI will probably do better. Writing, creating videos, generating ideas, all of it. The technology is already there, and it's only getting stronger.

So what's left? What's meaningful when the one-player games become obsolete? What's the purpose of all this if the things I've built my identity around can be replicated or surpassed by algorithms?

Stuck in the Mind

When I try to solve this question, my default mode is to think my way through it.

I use logic, planning, cognitive reasoning. I map it out like a problem to be solved, like if I just think hard enough or strategise effectively enough, the answer will reveal itself. But the more I do this, the more I try to satisfy the mind with mental gymnastics and clever frameworks, the more unfulfilling it feels.

You can set big goals this way. You can achieve impressive things. You can do a lot by living in your head, by staying in that cognitive space where everything is analysed and optimised. But at some point, it starts to feel hollow. Mental pursuits alone don't feel like the depth. They don't feel like the thing that will bring actual richness to life. There's something missing when you're always thinking about life instead of feeling your way through it.

I think for me, the struggle right now is a disconnect between what my mind wants and what my body actually needs. Between thinking and feeling. When you spend too long in your head, you end up rationalising everything, thinking through every decision, every possibility, every potential outcome. And while there's value in reflection and introspection, you can also miss the other side completely. You stop listening to your intuition. You stop feeling your way through life.

The Overprotective Parent

Here's what I've noticed about how the mind operates: it acts like an overprotective parent.

It creates a box you can live in. It tells you what to avoid, what feelings not to feel, what experiences to stay away from, all in an attempt to keep you safe. At first, this seems reasonable. The mind is just trying to protect you from obvious pain, from situations that might hurt you, from risks that seem too dangerous. But over time, it doesn't just protect you from genuine threats. It starts to shut you off from feeling anything at all.

The mind doesn't understand that feeling things, even difficult things, is actually fine. It treats every uncomfortable emotion like a crisis to be managed, every moment of uncertainty like a problem to be solved. So you end up not giving yourself permission to feel, to experience the full range of what it means to be human. And slowly, subtly, you get caged in by these likes and dislikes, these rigid preferences about what's acceptable and what's not.

What gets lost in this process is that deep, internal knowing. That connection to what feels right, what you should actually be doing with your life, what matters beyond the mind's constant calculations. And when you lose that connection, you end up trying to find meaning purely through thinking. You search for it like it's a logic puzzle to be cracked.

But you can't find meaning with the mind. There's no to-do list that will deliver it. No ChatGPT master plan that pieces it together. No amount of strategic thinking that suddenly makes everything click into place. Meaning has to come from something deeper than thought. It has to come from a genuine connection to yourself, to that part of you that knows things before you can articulate why.

When Life Felt Most Meaningful

Looking back, the times life felt most meaningful weren't when I was thinking the most. They were when I was fully in the moment, not overthinking, not analysing, just there.

In my early to mid-twenties, when I was playing poker at a high level, I wasn't consumed with grand plans or distant futures. I was just present. Every day felt immediate and alive. Let's go, let's do this, this moment right now matters. When I was with friends, I was fully engaged, fully there, not half-present while my mind wandered somewhere else.

I didn't have it all figured out. I wasn't following some master plan. I was just connected to the work, to the people around me, to the feeling of being alive in each moment. And that connection made everything feel meaningful, even without the grand narrative, even without knowing exactly where it was all leading.

I think that's what I've been missing lately. That sense of being in my body, in the present, responding to what's actually in front of me rather than living in my head, planning and analysing and trying to think my way to some future version of fulfillment.

Waiting For Meaning to Arrive

I think a lot of us, myself included, are waiting for meaning to arrive. Waiting to feel ready, waiting for clarity, waiting for the perfect moment when everything finally makes sense.

But what if meaning doesn't work that way? What if we wait until we're sixty or seventy and realise it never came because we were always waiting instead of participating? There's an element of active participation required here. Of leaning into life. Of fully expressing what you can in each moment and letting life teach you from that experience, rather than trying to figure it all out in advance.

You take one step to see the next step. Like climbing a mountain, you can't see the whole path from the bottom. You can only see the ground immediately in front of you. You take that step, and then the next one becomes visible. And then the one after that. I think that's how you actually find meaning, not by thinking about it from a distance, but by moving forward and discovering it as you go.

These reflections are my way of exploring this territory over the next 28 days. My way of putting out what feels authentic right now, not perfect or polished, and seeing what emerges from that. Taking the next step to see where it leads.

If you're reading this and finding yourself in a similar place, I'd genuinely like to know: Where are you struggling to find meaning? Where are you actually finding it? What's working for you in this navigation?

Because I don't think any of us are meant to figure this out alone.

And maybe that's part of the answer right there.

Adam