One life, but never feeling alive.

If you look back at your life will you be happy and satisfied with what you have done and what you accomplished. Really visualize it. Will you look down from the sky and think “I’ve done what I wanted to do” or will you look back full of regret.

Here is the sad reality: most people will go out with regret. And that is if they even have the capability to self-reflect to such an extent, but that is a topic for another conversation.

Most people never do things that are actually for themselves. Really think about it.

They go to school because of society.
They pick a school that their parents like.
They have a dead end job because the family needs them.
They go out on weekends and destroy their bodies because their friends say so.

That is like 90% of the human population. And if you really analyze that, most of those choices aren’t directly for themselves. Some may benefit them somewhat but it’s never the pure intention to do it for themselves.

If you’ve ever really talked to an average 40 to 50 year old man you can see the emptiness in their eyes. It’s not something most people particularly like to hear, nor do I particularly like to say it. But it is true.

Is that what you call alive? Doing things your whole life for somebody else? If you ask me that is a premature death rather than actually living, and sorry if that sounds harsh.

The ones who got it right

You probably think: who are the ones “who got it right”? And honestly, right isn’t really the correct word here. Who am I to say how you should live. If you are genuinely happy drinking yourself into oblivion and smoking until your lungs collapse, hats off man.

But chances are you are not part of that crowd if you are reading this. Chances are you have some kind of fire in you that is stuck. Something that needs to become real. Or in normal non-spiritual talk: you have something you want in life that is purely your own.

The happy older people I know all have one thing in common: they carved their own path.

Not without resistance. Not without people calling them selfish or difficult. But at some point they stopped asking for permission.

And here’s the thing. It didn’t come easy for any of them. There were hard moments, sacrifices, people who didn’t understand. But that’s exactly what makes it mean something. Every hero in every movie goes through hell before they get there. That’s not a coincidence. The struggle is the whole point.

The ones who chose the easy path, who followed the script, they’ll tell you themselves it wasn’t worth it. And the ones who didn’t all share one more thing.

Fitness as the catalyst

They are all fit. Every single one of them works out almost every day. And there is a really good reason for this.

Everything else starts from fitness. It is the foundation of feeling alive and living life on your own terms. Nobody benefits from you being fit besides yourself. You are the sole beneficiary of your healthy body and lifestyle. Nobody will carry you there either.

From my observation there are a few major reasons why fitness is a catalyst. One of them is obvious. The other one is not, although it is right in front of our noses.

The obvious one: if you are not fit and healthy it severely limits your ability to feel alive no matter what you do. If you go on vacation and you are constantly tired, sick, or dealing with a chronic condition that prevents you from enjoying anything, it is hard to actually feel alive. Because you feel like shit all the time.

The not so obvious one: being fit requires you to actively choose yourself. Constantly. And here is the funny thing about the world we live in. Everything is designed to make it easy for you to become overweight and unhealthy. Fast food on every corner. Alcohol at every social event. Screens built to keep you sitting. It creates this illusion of comfort. And that makes it ironically more uncomfortable to actually be healthy.

To be fit you have to cut alcohol, eat real food, move regularly, train consistently, go to bed early, skip events, say no to the cake at the family dinner.

You probably think: that sounds like restriction, not freedom. Like being trapped, not alive.

But here is the contradiction. Most people are already slaves, to their impulses, to social pressure, to comfort. They eat the cake because everyone else does. They drink because saying no is awkward. They skip the gym because the couch is right there. They call that freedom. It isn’t.

The person who trains at 6am, eats clean, and goes home early made a choice. Their own choice. Against the current. That is not restriction. That is the only real freedom that exists: the ability to choose your own constraints instead of having them chosen for you.

Going to bed early, skipping events, prioritizing recovery, choosing discomfort when everyone around you chooses comfort. That is not sacrifice. That is ownership.

Most people quit. Not because fitness is too hard. But because choosing themselves, consistently, against the resistance of their environment, is too hard.

That’s the real test. Not the training. The choosing.

And that is where it gets heavy. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The weight of awareness

There is a weight that comes with choosing. More options sounds better, but it isn’t always. The more choices you have, the more you carry the burden of making the wrong one. I tell people this sometimes: even choosing between ice cream flavors is already hard. You think about it after you picked. Did I choose the right one?

Let alone the choice of how to live your life.

That awareness is a lot more meaningful than ice cream, but it is infinitely harder to carry. It is something you have to choose every single day. And the more aware you become, the more weight those choices carry.

I struggle with this daily. It is a blessing and a curse at the same time. The blessing is that you have the awareness to choose for yourself and actually live by it. The curse is that when you don’t, you are fully aware of the potential you are leaving on the table.

Sometimes I think about how easy life would be if you just went with the flow. Even if that flow is constructed by society, something you never really chose but got programmed into your mind. Easy life. Low awareness. You die not knowing much, not questioning much.

Maybe ignorance really is bliss. But you are not that person. You are reading this for a reason.

The point

The feeling of being alive comes from making your own choices. Aware ones. And it all starts with fitness because your body is the main vehicle of your life. It teaches you what living for yourself actually feels like.

Everything that comes with building a fit body, the struggle, controlling your cravings, the hard workout sessions, that is the exact feeling that makes you feel alive. Even though it sometimes feels like dying, haha.

When you achieve the body you worked for, you look back at every choice you had to make to get there. That is the real definition of living. Controlling your own actions to shape the life you want.

And that is genuinely beautiful. Because you only get one life, friend. You already knew that. The question is what you are going to do with it.