At a family dinner in Jakarta, Kirana Sidin’s seven-year-old son looked across the table and told her, “Mom, you’re so jobless.” Seven-year-olds are not famous for their tact, and this one had simply said what he saw. I had a wonderful conversation with Kirana on my podcast, Inspire Vision, about what that comment set in motion. She had left work in the private sector and in government years earlier to raise her family, and she is now an author and strategic life coach. The comment stayed with her because it named something she already knew. She had been drifting, living inside a routine that worked, without building anything that was truly her own. Her book, Cheers for a Good Life, came out of that realization, and it rests on the idea that a good life needs four foundations working together: self-respect, purpose, meaningful relationships, and growth.
A quiet awareness like that can sit in a person for years. From the outside the life looks fine, and often it is fine. The marriage is good, there is enough money, the kids are doing well in school, and still something registers a mismatch between the life being lived and the person living it. Those four foundations help explain why. Strong relationships and a steady income can sit alongside a complete absence of purpose, and no amount of strength in one area makes up for a gap in another. The gap tends to surface as restlessness, or as a nagging sense of being capable of more, and it is easy to set aside because nothing is technically wrong. Many people in this position could not tell you what they want, though they are quite certain this is not it.
Drifting is an accurate word for it. A person who drifts is still moving, often competently, while the direction is being set somewhere else: by habit, by expectation, or by whatever a parent or a congregation once described as a successful life. Enough years of this and the question of personal values gets hard to answer. Most people can describe in detail what they are supposed to value and would struggle to say, with any confidence, what they actually do. Decisions made from that place tend to be reasonable and slightly wrong, which is exactly why they are so hard to catch.
One of the simplest ways to interrupt this is also the least dramatic. Before saying yes to the next committee, the promotion, the family obligation, the invitation that feels mandatory, a person pauses long enough to ask whether this is something they actually want. It sounds almost too small to matter, and it is worth pressing on. In practice the empty space fills quickly, usually with the same expectations that were making the decision in the first place, now speaking a little louder. A pause does not generate an answer by itself.
What, then, is the pause actually doing? The question matters, because a practice that only produces anxious silence would not be worth much. Its value is cumulative. A single pause rarely settles anything, but over months the pauses begin to show a pattern: the yes that comes out when a no was meant, which is often where self-respect quietly wears away, the kind of request that tightens the chest every time, the thing a person keeps returning to even when everyone nearby calls it impractical. That last one deserves attention. An interest that survives years of discouragement is usually carrying information about who a person is.
Clarity comes with a cost that tends to go unmentioned. Once a person sees that the life they are living is not quite theirs, fear arrives almost immediately. Leaving something comfortable after twenty years can feel like dying and being born again. In Thailand, where Theravada Buddhism shapes much of daily life, rebirth is a teaching about movement across many lifetimes, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms. The image also holds on a smaller scale. Within one human life, a person may leave several versions of themselves behind, and each departure asks for something close to the courage of a death. Growth, when it is real, often looks like this.
Fear tends to travel alongside that kind of change the whole way, which means waiting for it to leave first is a reliable way of never beginning. Noticing it is useful. It marks the place where something real is at stake. What does the damage is staying there. Knowing what matters and continuing to live around it is its own kind of loss, slower and quieter than anything the fear was warning about.
For many people the whole question arrives as a question about work, usually whether to leave. Sometimes the honest answer is yes. A job can wear a person down to the point where staying costs more than leaving, and no amount of reframing repairs that. For many others the restlessness points past the job. Someone who comes alive through music, or making things with their hands, or time given to someone in need may find that what they are missing can live outside the office, with the job paying for the room it needs. Work holds a different weight once it is no longer asked to be the whole of a life.
Underneath all of it sits a question about identity. Much of what people pursue, the house, the title, the income that signals arrival, works as an answer to who they are, and the ego accepts those answers gladly because they can be counted. Genesis 1:27 makes a different kind of claim. It says humanity was made in the image of God, which is a statement about what a person is before they have acquired, achieved, or been approved of at all. If that is true, it changes where a decision can come from.
What would it look like to choose from there, from what was already present before any of the performing began? Most people have rarely made a decision from that place, and it may take a while to recognize what it feels like when one does.
Consider where this might apply in your own life, perhaps the next time a yes is halfway out before you have asked who is really answering. View the entire podcast here.
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen