The addiction nobody is talking about

You Are The Brand | 5 minute read

On purpose, letting go, and why the universe has never once needed your supervision.

What if the relentless pursuit of purpose is actually the thing keeping you from experiencing your life?

Alan Watts spent his career asking questions that the modern world was far too busy to sit with, and this one has been living in my head for weeks now.

We have built entire identities around the idea that meaning must be earned, optimized, and performed, and somewhere in all of that striving we forgot that the universe has been doing just fine without our supervision for approximately fourteen billion years… give or take a few billion. This is not a piece about doing less, it is about something far more interesting than that.

The addiction nobody is talking about

Modern culture is addicted to purpose, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word, because the symptoms are everywhere once you start looking for them. You must have a business purpose and a life purpose and a health purpose and a fitness purpose, and even the very act of leisure must justify itself with some kind of outcome, some measurable return that proves the time was not entirely wasted. Rest is only acceptable if it makes you more productive. Play is only permitted if it sharpens your edge. Joy, apparently, requires a return on investment before anyone is willing to fully commit to it.

If you know anything about me, you know I reference the great philosophers frequently… I came across something from one of my favs,  Alan Watts recently that cracked something open for me in a way I have been sitting with ever since, because I think it names something most of us feel somewhere underneath all the noise but have never quite been able to say out loud.

We are trying to hold sunlight in the palm of our hand, and we cannot understand why it keeps slipping through our fingers no matter how tightly we close our fist.

The echo chamber you built yourself

At some point, and nobody can tell you exactly when it happened, the simple experience of being alive became something you started managing.

The questions that were once natural and curious turned into something that sounds more like a performance audit running quietly in the background of everything you do.

What should I be doing right now? Am I showing up correctly? Is this the right decision? What does this say about who I am? Am I taking this seriously enough, or perhaps too seriously, and how would I even know the difference?

That particular kind of mental noise is not wisdom and it is not discernment, even when it disguises itself as both. It is the sound of a mind that has been so thoroughly trained to assign meaning and measure outcomes that it has forgotten how to simply be inside an experience without immediately evaluating it from the outside.

All of that noise, every single thread of it, is self-created theater, and the tragedy is not that we created it but that we have become so accustomed to living inside it that the performance has started to feel like the point.

"This is the real secret of life to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play." — Alan Watts

We have not mistaken the map for the territory, we have mistaken the anxiety about the map for the experience of actually being somewhere.

What the tree already knows

Watts had this observation that I cannot stop turning over in my mind, and it is deceptively simple in the way that the most important things usually are.

The tree does not stress about growing. The bird does not agonize over whether its song is landing with enough authenticity. The water does not hold a planning session before it decides to flow downhill. All of them are simply and completely perfect expressions of whatever the universe is doing through them, without commentary, without self-monitoring, without the particular exhaustion of someone who has turned their entire existence into a performance review they administer to themselves.

We are, as far as anyone can tell, the only ones who looked at the natural order of things and decided it needed a strategic framework.

"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves." — Alan Watts

Nobody asked us to assign this much weight to every decision. Nobody required us to turn every season of life into an initiative with measurable deliverables and a quarterly review. We inherited a framework that told us movement equals worth and busyness equals virtue and productivity is the proof that you deserve to occupy the space you are in, and most of us never stopped long enough to ask whether any of that was actually true or just something we absorbed so early it started to feel like gravity.

The difference between letting go and giving up

Ok ok ok, Deevo slow the F down you might be saying… and this is the part that tends to get misread, and I want to be very precise about it because the confusion here is where most people abandon this line of thinking before it gets genuinely useful.

Letting go is not the same as giving up, and the world we grew up in handed us a definition that collapsed them into nearly the same thing, which is one of the more expensive conceptual mistakes a person can carry through their life without ever stopping to examine it.

To give up says nothing matters, therefore I am done, and it is rooted entirely in despair. To let go says something completely different. It says I have cared about this deeply, I have given this meaning, and I am releasing my grip on the outcome without releasing my engagement with the experience itself. It is freedom from clinging, not freedom from caring, and there is an enormous distance between those two things even when our language makes them sound like neighbors.

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." — Alan Watts

You can work with full devotion without turning your work into a cross you carry everywhere. You can love something deeply without making the outcome a referendum on your worth. You can show up completely and consistently without white-knuckling every result until the joy drains out of the very thing you started because it genuinely excited you.

The sage, as Watts described it, acts as if nothing matters precisely because he understands that everything does. He simply does not assign the weight in a way that makes every moment feel load-bearing.

Impermanence is not loss

One of the quieter reasons we suffer is that we demand permanence from things that were never built to last, and then we experience the natural movement of life as a kind of theft.

We want our successes and our relationships and our identities to hold their shape indefinitely. We want to carve eternity into what is fundamentally a flowing and impermanent experience, so we cling to roles we have outgrown and narratives we were handed and versions of ourselves that stopped fitting years ago but feel safer than the uncertainty of whatever comes next. Life does not cooperate with any of this. It decays and renews, ends and begins, sometimes in the same breath, and calling that process loss implies that something was stolen from us when really we were simply holding something that was never ours to keep in the first place.

The water does not belong to the hands that cup it. The sunlight does not belong to the arms that try to hold its warmth.

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." — Alan Watts

When you begin to actually understand this rather than just intellectually agree with it, something quiet and significant happens. You stop trying to force meaning onto situations and start allowing them to unfold as they naturally would. You stop supervising your life from a distance and start inhabiting it from the inside. And in that shift, something that feels genuinely like freedom begins to become available in a way it never quite was when you were busy managing every outcome from the outside looking in.

You are the wave

There is a version of ambition that is rooted in genuine curiosity and love for the work, and there is a version that is rooted in the terror of what it would mean to stop moving. They can look identical from the outside and feel completely different from the inside, and one of the more honest questions a person can sit with is which one is actually driving them on any given day.

The universe does not need your supervision… it never did. What it has always asked of you is not your control but your presence, not your management of outcomes but your genuine engagement with the experience of being alive inside whatever you are building or becoming or letting go of in this particular season.

"You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago." — Alan Watts

You are the wave, not the oceanographer, that is not a reason to stop swimming, it is a reason to stop pretending you are responsible for the tide.

If something in here landed somewhere real, reply and tell me what it stirred up. That conversation is almost always worth having.

About Deevo

Deevo is a brand strategist, identity architect, and founder of The Brand Storyteller. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, narrative, and strategic clarity, helping founders and executives figure out what they are actually building, who it is actually for, and why so much of their effort feels like it should be compounding faster than it is. He works privately with a small number of people at a time, which is either very intentional or very antisocial depending on who you ask. He does not call himself a coach. If you have read this far you already know why.

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