How to answer the question: what do you do for a living?

The empath’s guide to becoming worth a damn

I have been pondering this question… and until just now haven’t found a satisfying answer.

The question is: what do you do? What do you do for a living, Sophie?

I do seemingly many things, don’t I? I write articles, I talk to people, I lead courses, I coach people, I measure stuff, I read a lot so I can guide you well.

But what I have never thought to say: I am a developer. I develop methodologies, particularly the methodology to take a normal person from homo sapiens to human being. From a meaning making machine to a person who can see the meaning but not honor it as the truth.

Life is empty and meaningless. The meaning you see is added, by a human. You either added your own meaning, or most likely you added an inherited meaning.

OK, so what?

But it is not a so what, because your meaning is what makes you belligerent, dull, resistant, lazy, slothful, conceited, delusional, arrogant, superior, and other ways of being that rarely work for your benefit.

Your life, your behavior is determined by your meaning, the meaning YOU give to things. And all of that meaning is harmful to you, because it wedges itself between you and reality… so your actions are never a perfect dance with what is… only with what you said about what is.

Until you can step back and distance yourself, disengage yourself, detach yourself from the meaning you gave, your life cannot change, you’ll keep doing what you have always done, ending up with the same results, feelings, and relationships you have had. Or health. Or finances.

Positive thinkers have been saying this forever, but they make one horrid blunder: they suggest that you change the meaning… But what happens when you change something? The changed thing carries with itself what you changed… so nothing changes.