Stop Looking for Answers Outside Yourself

The more you look to others for answers, the more disconnected and miserable you become. This is about breaking that cycle and facing reality on your own terms.

Throughout this piece, I use the term “high-bandwidth mavericks.” If you’re more familiar with the language of giftedness or gifted individuals, you can mentally substitute that framing here. I don’t find the label myself accurate, but the underlying experience overlaps more than the terminology suggests.

Photo by James Ting on Unsplash

There’s this trap a lot of people fall into without even realizing it. You keep looking for answers outside yourself, thinking someone else has already figured it out. You listen to podcasts, you watch YouTube videos, you read books, etc. You absorb everything, and in the hope that something will finally click and give you that well-needed clarity. It feels productive, especially at the very start, like you’re moving forward, like you’re learning. But in reality, you’re just stacking other people’s interpretations of their own perceptions and experiences on top of your own confusion. And the more you do that, the further you drift away from anything that actually feels real.

The problem isn’t that information, and easy access to it, exists on its own. The problem is that we have, collectively, started to believe that answers come from someplace else then ourselves. That someone, or something, out there will always know better then us, see the world more clearly, and can hand you a framework or rule-based system that will finally fix your life struggles. It’s a comforting idea, but it’s also complete bullshit. Straight up, snake oil. Most of what people share is just a story they’ve told themselves after the fact. It might sounds structured, intentional, even meaningful, but it’s still built on hindsight (reverse engineering of conditions), not truth. And yet we all take it in like it’s something of a godly revelation... because we’ve all been taught so.

What makes it worse is how convincing it all feels. There is the confidence, the directness or clarity, the way everything is packaged so cleanly, almost surgically. It’s fundamentally designed to give you the illusion that there’s a path you can follow if you just pay close attention. But real life doesn’t work like that at all, and deep down you already know it. That’s why none of it actually sticks. You might feel motivated or inspired for a moment, but it fades quickly because this path was never yours to begin with. Podcasts, videos, and books can tell you how to be successful, but practice shows success to be both a thing of skill and a bit of luck over anything else.

After a while, this constant intake, paired with the lack of observing positive outcomes, starts to wear you down. Even when you’re not actively looking for answers, everything else around you starts to feel off. Movies, music, conversations, it all starts to feel so forced, like it’s trying to imprint something into your head, instead of just existing for the sake of it. There’s no space left to just experience something as it is. “It used to be better in the old days”, you hear some people say. And yes, there is a very good reason for that, outside of how memories work. Everything feels filtered nowadays, controlled, shaped to hold your attention. To sell you something, one way on another. And instead of relaxing yourself, you end up feeling even more disconnected. At least, I do.

That’s where, at least for me, the boredom comes from. And it’s not the kind of boredom people usually talk about. It’s not that there’s nothing to do. It’s that nothing nowadays feels genuine anymore. You can sit down, try to switch off your head, try to enjoy something simple, and still, it just doesn’t land. It feels empty because you can see through the modern veil. You can see the cogs rattling in the structures behind it, the intention, the not so subtle push. And once you see that, it’s hard to go back. Even the simple enjoyment of things becomes a difficult thing to do.

At some point, you have to admit that you’re part of the problem. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because you keep playing along with it. Day in, and day out. After all, you pick up your phone from the table just as fast as you put it down a mere second ago. You keep searching, consuming, and hoping that the next thing will be different. But, I’ll tell you, it won’t. As long as you believe that someone else is going to give you the answer, you’ll remain stuck in that very loop. You’re handing over your sense of direction to systems exploiting your reptilian brain, and people (simple pawns) who are just guessing in their own right to what they wholeheartedly believe is the “right” path.

Reality, especially to high-bandwidth Mavericks, tends to be built around a much more simple equation. There isn’t some sort of hidden formula that you haven’t found yet. There isn’t a person who’s going to explain your life back to you in a way that suddenly makes everything make sense. No story to make up for of current events. You don’t figure things out by listening or reading more (that includes to me), you figure things out by actually living. By doing things, by making decisions, by dealing with the consequences. It’s messy, it’s unclear, and it doesn’t come with guarantees, but it’s the only thing that’s real.

And yeah, that can feel isolating, especially in nowadays’ turmoil. Because once you stop relying on all that external noise, you realize how much everyone else still is. People are plugged into it 24/7, shaped by it, constantly moving along with it. When you step out of that (even if it’s only for one day of the week), suddenly, there’s distance. You’re not following the same 3D script anymore. You’re free, in a sense, but you’re also on your own more than ever before. It’s definitely not easy.

But that’s the trade-off. You either stay inside the system and keep chasing answers and make up stories that don’t belong to you, or you step out and deal with the uncertainty directly. There’s no clean version of this where everything feels comfortable and makes sense all the time. You don’t get clarity handed to you. You build it, slowly and steadily, through your own experience, without (or, at the very least, minimize) letting the external pressures dictate your day-to-day actions.

At the end of it, there’s really nothing left to decode. There’s no final answer waiting somewhere. It’s just you, your choices, and whatever you make of them. And that’s the part most people try to avoid, even though it’s the only thing that actually leads anywhere.

For more information on NEXUS, the NEXUS Werkstatt in Berlin, our 1:1 sessions, transmissions, books and other items, please visit our website nexuswerkstatt.com, or reach out directly.