VRILL INSIGHTS
FAITH IS A DOPAMINE HACK
(Don't Tell the Atheists)
At 17 I got obsessed with the idea of making money online. Not to make money, but to not be geographically tied to a place and hopefully be in control of my own time.
I never liked authority. And I despised the idea of being tied to something. Be it a place, a job or something else.
Like the good little boy I was, I tried to figure out how to make money online. I spent money I didn’t have on courses teaching me things I didn’t like.
For a decade I planned for far too long, then executed the plan for far too little time and pivoted to the next great thing. From Amazon FBA, to affiliate marketing, to newsletters, to YouTube, to online coaching.
Not one of those things was a reflection of me. I did not have the motivation to do the work required to get the rewards I wanted.
I tried to optimize my way to freedom. It took a decade of doing this before I made a penny online. And it took me a decade to realize why.
Faith has a mechanism, and you don’t need a church to use it. You don’t even have to call yourself religious.
Your fear of putting yourself in a box will hold you back from understanding what I’m about to say.
Fuck the boxes. Fuck the labels. Fuck the concepts. Listen without judgement.
After reading this you will understand how one idea will change how your body feels about the future.
You’ve been searching for the holy grail all this time. The one thing that will fix your problems, that will quiet your mind, that will set you free. And you’ve been looking in the wrong places.
I reached a breaking point where I had to choose.
Do I keep using optimization and my big intellect as a cope to justify my search for meaning, or do I quit and retreat back into a life not examined?
I said no to both. There must be another way. The path I chose was one of faith.
Faith is a hack my dear friend. It’s the only hack that removes the need for all other hacks.
Here’s what I was doing before. I was searching for the manifestation of my ideal self, so that I could once and for all accept myself as whole.
I defined it as best I could. Then I defined all the steps, the frameworks, the underpinning philosophy that would take me there. Then I put the weight of the world on my shoulders and judged myself every day against that ideal.
The ideal was the perfect being manifested as my ultimate potential. An almost god-like version of me. And if I did not reach it, I failed.
Far, far away, on the distant horizon, I could see a blurry silhouette of that person. Grasping at it daily but never really getting closer. That fucks with your head. At least it fucked with mine.
And every plan I made had the responsibility of getting me to that person. But I was the one standing on the shore, gazing into the foggy abyss, and also the one who made the plan.
Not only that. I was the one who decided where I wanted to go. How could I trust that place was somewhere I’d enjoy, somewhere I’d finally be whole, somewhere I’d finally have peace of mind?
I’m not omniscient. Why would I trust that my ideal, or the road to it, is correct?
I didn’t. And neither did my body.
I just never understood what it was telling me. I called it lack of motivation. I called it a discipline problem. I thought I needed to optimize more.
Here’s what I know now. Motivation is not a mood. It’s a verdict.
Somewhere in you sits an accountant. It decides where your energy is allowed to go, and dopamine is how it signs off. Forget the chemistry. All you need to know is that it decides what you get to move toward, mentally and physically.
The accountant has one rule. It funds what looks likely to pay off, and it declines everything else.
Now look at what I kept asking it to fund. An ideal I could barely see. A road I had drawn myself. A payoff that only existed if I arrived, ten years from now, as someone I’d never met.
Of course it said no. Any sane accountant would. Far, blurry and uncertain is a terrible investment, and my body knew it long before my intellect did.
Every course I bought was a pitch. Every time, the accountant read the numbers and quietly declined. I thought I was lazy. I was being audited.
Planning kept me going for a while, because planning feels like progress. You get the hit of moving forward without ever paying for it. But the accountant doesn’t fund a feeling. It funds results.
So what changes the numbers?
Not a better plan. A plan is just another pitch from the same person the accountant already doesn’t trust.
The only option left was to close the distance.
I stopped aiming at a place I couldn’t see and started following a pull I could feel, and the pull paid out every time I moved.
I had to let go of the idea that the ideal has to be a thought. I replaced my north star with truth, the highest good, God. Call it whatever you want, as long as you sense it.
Because it is a sense and not a concept, it has no distance. It is here with us at all times. What I was trying to attach my motivation to stopped being an abstract place with a million decisions between me and it. It was here.
The accountant could now see it, sense it, feel it. And it went, “Release the budget. Use everything we’ve got to get this kid moving toward whatever this thing is, because it is valuable.”
In an instant the conceptual fog that had made it impossible to see where I should be going was gone. I was no longer constrained by my own conceptual prison. I was free.
Instead of an endless battle with myself, pushing toward an abstract ideal, I became a kid again. A kid with a sense of adventure, a sense of meaning, a sense of something pulling me into the future. I decided to listen to it.
Nowadays planning does nothing for me. All I want to do is act. Because it is in action that the sense becomes known. I cannot speak to God if I do not act. I do not know what to do next unless I do.
The accountant now pays me for my action, not my thoughts. The more I act, the better my sense becomes and the more motivated I am.
Last year was the first time since childhood I listened to that sense. Since taking the leap of faith I have started a business with my friend, gained 4 clients, built countless apps and websites, and made enough money online to survive.
Now over to you. Your soul has been screaming at you to do things for your entire life. It is time to start listening to it again.
Within 24 hours, pick one thing that is pulling you and take one action that aligns with that sense.
Do not plan it. Do not justify it. Do not think.
Notice what happens within you. Can you sense that awe-inspired kid spring to life?
Faith is a hack because it allows your entire being to align itself with actions that pull you toward a future meant for you. I like to call it divine destiny. You can call it whatever you want.
Instead of trying to structure your life around what you think is good, let reality pull you forward toward where you’re meant to go, and life will start to structure itself around what is actually good.
Close the distance.
Anyway, love you, bye.
By: @theswedishmj
PS. The accountant also reads the room. Under-fed, under-slept and stressed, it assumes bad times and rations.
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