Feeling lost in life is typically regarded as an objectively negative experience. This is completely understandable, considering that these phases are often accompanied by feelings of emptiness, apathy, cynicism, jadedness, victimization, envy, insecurity and incompetency (even though you might actually be extremely competent and hold a lot of potential), isolation, a lack of passion, and so on. As if that weren’t enough, this phase also often involves having absolutely no idea what to do next, while feeling a terribly exhausted, burned-out feeling of fear and hopelessness towards the future—all of which feed into each other, as well as your sense of stagnation in repetitive loops. 

Many people understandably don’t appreciate the feeling of being lost because they fail to see any meaning or value in it. And how could you when you feel all these negative emotions all the time? But I want you to know that it is possible to gain a lot during these times, and I will show you how in the suggestions below. 

Useful Questions to Ask Yourself

To start off with, I find that simply asking myself the following questions can instantly provide me with some level of clarity, equanimity, and faith “needed” during these times:

• During this time so far, have you learned anything important about yourself or developed any positive qualities within yourself? Has this ever happened before, when you’ve felt this way (lost and empty) in the past?
• Could these periods of feeling lost potentially be necessary parts of your journey to becoming the very best version of yourself that you can possibly be? 
• Is it possible that these phases have helped you to find yourself and become more authentic, self-aware, compassionate, humble, and/or strong?

In addition to asking myself the questions mentioned above, I also ask myself what lessons I can derive from these experiences. 

For example, perhaps these moments are trying to teach you to look more inward for answers, value, or meaning in life if you can’t seem to find any in the external world, which may be causing you to feel lost. 

Or, perhaps these experiences are trying to teach you to develop greater faith and trust in the process, while also addressing your attitudes towards the future. Many people unconsciously try to resist experiencing uncertainty in particular (which is inevitably experienced when thinking about the future) at all costs, as the fear it generates is almost intollerable for them. This explains why numerous people – when given the choice, as well as the privilege to be able to choose – choose to stay well within their comfort zones (in many different ways) for their entire lives.

Maybe the fact that a lot of it feels beyond your control or remains unknown to you makes you feel afraid or insecure on some level (which is completely understandable), and these experiences are challenging you to accept these feelings and learn to feel comfortable with uncertainty.

The fact that we even need answers, or that we even “need” anything during this time shows a level of mistrust in the unknown and discomfort with uncertainty (which is completely normal). That is precisely why it’s often worthwhile to end this process of exploring questions and seeking answers with a gentle reminder to surrender to the unknown; in doing so, you will embody the true essence of living earnestly in the present moment.

Try to connect with a sense of gratitude for not knowing what the future holds. Doing this allows you to be receptive to the gifts of the present moment. 

It may be helpful to remember the corny saying that “uncertainty is the spice of life.” As cheesy as it might sound, life would never feel fulfilling or interesting if it came with an instruction manual on how to live your life every step of the way. In fact, you would probably feel even worse than you do now, as you would literally be a slave to life. 

I recommend recording your answers to the questions above in a journal (both digital and written formats work fine), rather than just answering them mentally, as written responses are often more precise and detailed. This makes them easier to reflect on and learn from, which might help to give you the clarity you seek. 

How Our Expectations and Associations Define Our Experience

We tend to attach negative associations to the experiences we fear exploring. These associations are created out of the emotional expectations we have for those experiences. We then mistakenly assume that these associations are derived from reality itself, rather than recognizing the truth, which is that our mind produced our own version of reality out of fear, and so we never even gave reality itself a chance to be experienced (free from our biased associations). 

Likewise, in regards to feeling lost, many of us tend to wrongly assume that the associations we have with it (e.g., low energy, hopelessness, cynicism, apathy, etc.) are automatically produced as a result of experiencing this lack of direction, when in reality, these associations may actually have little or even nothing to do with this experience. 

We often live through associations as opposed to experiencing things just as they are to “protect” us from uncertainty, as well as the insights we might find if we were to jump into the present moment and surrender to “not knowing.” This is because many of these insights could potentially be negative ones about ourselves. Instead, many people unconsciously opt to see themselves, others, and the world around them how they want to, as deluded as their perceptions may be.

In essence, our experience of the world, as well as our inner clarity, gets significantly reduced and filtered through our predefined emotional and mental conclusions for the circumstances we’re in, due to our resistance to being fully involved with the present moment out of fear.  

It is entirely possible to feel lost without also feeling other negative emotions that are associated with it, if we courageously release our resistance to uncertainty, the present moment, and reality itself, rather than living in our own deluded preconception of reality, which is created mostly out of assumptions, associations, fear, flattering ideals, and ignorance.

View This Phase as an Opportunity

I believe that viewing this phase in your life as an opportunity—to develop certain positive qualities within yourself, to reconnect with yourself, to get to know yourself on a deeper level, or to learn something important about yourself or the world in general—rather than as a simply negative experience, devoid of any real value—can help us avert the negative accumulation of emotions that are often accompanied with feeling lost. 

By choosing to think of this experience as an opportunity, you can rewire your attitude towards this phase as being something positive, providing you with value, rather than defining it as the absence of something, as you might have done previously.

The more you challenge yourself to do this and strive to see experiences as they truly are, without relying on any expectations or associations to define them, the more you might find that feeling this way isn’t as negative or as frightening as you initially thought it would be. 

Furthermore, think about what else you have been doing throughout this period that might have been useful or beneficial for you in some way. 

We often feel lost or depressed when comparing our current situation to the past. Nostalgia often has a way of making everything from the past look better, brighter, and happier, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it truly was so. 

In fact, you might find yourself in the future longingly looking back at this moment—that’s just the nature of nostalgia and our minds always craving what we can’t have. But there’s probably at least one very special thing that you have now that you didn’t have before, which is definitely deserving of praise and gratitude. 

Embrace All Emotions without Clinging to Them

There will inevitably be fluctuations in your emotions and moods all throughout your life, but all of them will inevitably come to pass at some point. This is a vital thing to remember, as it will help you to avoid remaining “stuck” in the emotion. 

You can allow this moment of feeling lost to pass by accepting the experience and allowing it to flow through you, rather than resisting it, or clinging too much to it. This can be done by simply observing your experience with a sense of openness, acceptance, and curiosity, rather than judging it or attaching any other emotions to it. 

Even if your experience is unpleasant, or you’re noticing that you’re not feeling okay, try to not judge your experience and remember that there’s nothing wrong with not feeling okay sometimes and continue just observing it (more about this below). If you do this for a long enough time, you will eventually notice your inner reactivity, stress level, and resistance to the present moment will go down.

Remember It’s Okay Not to Feel Okay

Again, try to not judge your experience, as that often creates more inner reactivity, which adds to the original source of stress. Trying to resist any kind of negative emotion only makes it worse. The key here is to observe anything you experience in a loving and accepting way as it passes, without forcing any emotion or thought towards you or away from you; just let them be as they are.

Allow yourself to not feel okay, if that feeling is true for you in the present moment, with openness and acceptance, as there is nothing wrong with not feeling okay sometimes. In fact, if we release our resistance to feeling this way and have the courage to be completely honest and vulnerable with ourselves while turning inward, this feeling can reveal invaluable information and insight about a change that needs to happen in order to improve our life.

Negative emotions in general are often instrumental to improving life. Most people need to experience something fairly unpleasant or even traumatic to acquire the humility, awareness, and motivation necessary to make huge changes that were desperately needed in their lives.

However, for these positive transformations to have happened in the first place, you first needed to become conscious of and acknowledge how you were feeling, to even know that something was off and that a change needed to happen in your life. 

It is so easy to get caught up with the distractions and demands of daily life and social conditioning, that many of us never even notice the numbing feeling we’re experiencing deep down. 

Additionally, observing your own suffering in mindful, loving, and non-judgemental ways can often exceptionally increase the amount of compassion that you feel for others (as well as yourself), as you begin to more strongly relate to the pain of others. 

This is because our thoughts of others and the world around us are projections of our own feelings towards ourselves. If you regularly practise mindfulness, which is a form of self-love, you will respond to others as you do with yourself—with more love, understanding, acceptance, and compassion, instead of judgement. 

Many people remain unwilling to access and explore their deepest emotions and vulnerability for their entire lives, and hence never end up growing into better versions of themselves. 

In this way, accepting your emotional experience without judgement can serve as your first step toward a better life. Ultimately, doing this can even help us to discover our deepest, truest selves and lead us to where we really should be in life. We just need to be willing to follow the feeling and to try out different things until the feeling gradually dissipates or gets replaced by excitement and faith in both the future, as well as ourselves.

Meditate on Your Mortality

Meditating on your mortality might sound like an incredibly morbid and distressing idea, but it is really just a meditation on change, impermanence, and gratitude, which, on the contrary, can be incredibly life-giving.  

This kind of meditation can be beneficial in so many ways (if you can remain open-minded about it), and there is even a fair amount of research to back this up. 

First, becoming more conscious of the impermanence of life has a way of enhancing your inner clarity. This causes the desires and fixations that don’t truly add much inherent value to your life to fade away from your mind, resulting in spending your remaining time more wisely and intentionally, due to a significantly elevated sense of urgency. It can also cause you to become much more clear on what you deeply want and need, as well as what you no longer want in your life, which can be such powerfully transformative knowledge to obtain. 

Additionally, becoming conscious of your short time here can intensify your experience, zest, and reverence for life, making your current experience so much more joyful and beautiful than it was before, even if nothing changes (externally) and you don’t do anything different in your life than before. 

This may explain why those who are told that they only have a short amount of time left to live experience remarkable amounts of inner transformation and clarity during the time leading up to their death. It may also explain why survivors of life-threatening illnesses often consider this past threat to be a blessing, as it awakened them to countless insights and invoked them with such a strong appreciation for life like no other experience ever has. This then drove them to live the rest of their lives with so much more intention, passion, and vigour than before. These effects become even more pronounced the closer an individual is to death.

Death has a way of humbling us and violently unmasking our vulnerability, fears, and repressions, allowing us to become significantly more receptive to the truth about ourselves, lessons to be learnt, and where there is a lot of room to grow, as it painfully dissolves our enormous, self-loathing egos that cannot bear to see any perceived “mistakes” or “failures.” As the (somewhat cliché, but very true) saying goes, “death is our greatest teacher.”

How to Do This Meditation

To get started with this meditation, imagine you have a life-threatening illness and mentally answer the questions listed below, in as much mental and emotional detail and imagery as possible. Take as long as you need to do this. In fact, the more time you can spend thinking about each one, while fully connecting to your vulnerability and the huge range of emotions you would feel in such a situation, the more beneficial this meditation will be for you. If there are too many questions for you to think about all at once, consider answering one question each day, or coming back to them when you’re ready. 

• What would give my life a greater sense of meaning, aliveness, and fulfillment?
• What is missing from my life? 
• How would I live differently if I only had 2 years left to live? What about 6 months? Three months? Three weeks? What feelings come up and why? 
• What would I stop doing and what would I start doing? Why?
• What fears would I have if I was told I only had 2 weeks left to live? What specifically is it about those fears that scare me the most? How can I address those fears right now?
• What would I truly feel most reverence for in my life?
• How can I add more genuine happiness, freedom, and truth to my life in 1 year before my death?
• During my dying hour, what regrets would I have? How can I change the narrative now and die without having those regrets? 

Tangible Things We Can Do to Feel Purposeful Again

Learn More About Your Interests and Potential Career Paths

This tip might seem more obvious and basic compared to my other tips, but this list simply wouldn’t be complete without it, and it’s never a bad idea to do it.

While the value of researching your interests is an incredible first step to take, it certainly doesn’t exceed the importance of my next tip (which is to try things out in person). You can’t really make a fully informed and accurate decision about what’s right for you without ever trying things out in person. There are certainly limits to the depth of knowledge and understanding you can have about something, without experiencing it firsthand.

However, the benefits of learning more about your career interests are 3-fold and cannot be overstated: 1) researching potential careers (in addition to trying them out in person, if possible) helps you to make a more educated decision about whether it’s right for you, 2) you have a greater chance of succeeding in any given pursuit if you are more knowledgeable about it, and 3) making this first step can really set you in motion towards your goal. Building momentum after being stagnant for so long can feel so empowering and propel you forward like few things really can. Like someone I know always says, “95% of the work involved in anything is starting it.” 

Try Things Out in Person

Try doing activities related to the occupations you’re considering in person (if possible), prior to formally pursuing it as a career, to see if you even like it. If you do this and find you don’t like a job, then you can easily just pursue something else, since you haven’t yet invested in the formal process required to pursue it, saving you a lot of unnecessary stress, time, money (especially if it requires additional schooling), energy, etc.

This might sound kind of obvious, but it’s one thing to read about things that interest you online, and quite another to actually try doing these things in real life, which many people seem to forget. 

I personally believe that you can’t ever really know if you like something until you actually try it out yourself, in person. And I believe that if you actively keep trying different things out, you’ll eventually stumble upon something you like. 

Set Goals and Plan Them Out

In terms of other practical, concrete things we can do to provide us with a sense of direction during these times, setting goals can certainly help. 

Try breaking your goals down into baby steps as much as possible and plan which mini steps you hope to accomplish on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and be sure to PRIORITIZE THEM. 

If you find that you’re still not completing anything, then you might be unrealistically setting goals that are either too large or too numerous to complete. This can make you feel overwhelmed when thinking about everything that needs to get done, which can actually cause you to do nothing at all. 

Regularly completing very few small tasks is certainly better than not completing anything, so try dividing your goals into extremely small steps and only challenging yourself to do no more than 1-3 of these steps each day (you can assign yourself more to do once you finish everything). This can help keep stagnation and crippling anxiety at bay by making the whole process seem much easier and more manageable. Additionally, actually finishing tasks on your to-do list throughout the day if you’re not used to doing so can boost your self-confidence and be very empowering.

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by the baby steps you’ve assigned to yourself, then break them down even further, until they seem very easy and simple to accomplish. With practise, you will get better at knowing the perfect amount of work to assign to yourself each day—an amount that is both realistic and will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed, but still challenges you.

Creating a vision board for the near future (for the next few months or the next year) can help us get clear on what we want our life to look like. It might sound frivolous or unnecessary, but doing this can specifically help us set well-defined and fully envisioned intentions for the future. This can then provide us with a sense of direction by supplying us a tangible idea or vision of which concrete steps to take next, which can also help us to feel inspired and motivated enough to pull through with them all the way to completion, if we always know what to do next.

This can definitely zap us out of a feeling of sluggish aimlessness and replace it with the opposite—focused, purposeful action, which actually sets us on a path towards something. 

Vision boards are so effective because they tend to keep us focused on what we want in the present moment and near future, allowing us to avoid feeling lost or lacking in purpose, goals, or intention. Additionally, they can serve as a powerful source of inspiration, as well as a crucial reminder of our goals and intentions, and why we are doing what we are doing, which also helps us to feel purposeful.

Don’t Neglect Self-Care

Lastly, practising any form of self-care can also help one to accept any kind of negative emotion (e.g., feeling hopeless and lost) and build resilience towards it. 

Self-care can also effectively function as a proactive self-protective measure. Experiencing negative emotions can become such a regular part of life that we may not even be aware of how much they drastically affect us, our strength, and our ability to handle stress over time. This also impairs our ability to effectively help others. 

For all these reasons, I highly recommend you develop a ritual of self-care practises to do on a daily basis. 

Since it’s often better to stick to a smaller ritual consistently than it is to challenge yourself to a larger ritual that you are not able to maintain in the long run, challenge yourself to adopt a smaller self-care ritual to begin with, and work your way up once you find yourself being consistent. Seeing yourself be consistent will also be very empowering and will provide you with the motivation you need to continue.

If performing a self-care practise on a daily basis is unrealistic for you, then strive to do it on a regular basis, such as by assigning it to you on certain days of the week. 

If you’re looking for ideas or inspiration on self-care practises to try, you can find a list of highly effective, holistic, and financially accessible suggestions here. This list consists of self-care practises that seem to be the most effective, particularly in terms of sustaining mental, emotional, and spiritual health.  

What are some things you do to cope or deal with feeling lost?

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