Trying to "figure it out"?

Why getting quiet isn’t always the answer (and what actually helps)

When I quit my job four years ago, I thought I was making the brave move. I was bored, deeply uninspired, and unfulfilled by what I was doing. What I wanted — more than anything! — was clarity. Clarity about who I was, what I wanted, and what kind of life I was meant to be living.

I though to myself: I’m smart, talented, and adaptable — I just need to get quiet and figure it out…

Figure it out.

Those three words have eluded me for much of my adulthood.

I just need to figure it out…

If I could just figure it out…

“Figuring it out” became both the goal and the pressure. The answer and the question.

Because I genuinely believed that clarity would come from getting quiet, I unplugged. Hard.

I slowed down and followed all the typical guidance: morning pages, yoga, meditation…

What no one tells you about getting quiet

We were raised in systems that promised certainty and control. We were rewarded for being good students, good employees, good planners. But now? The roadmap is gone. The world keeps shifting beneath us.

Getting quiet, while helpful, can dull more than just noise; they can actually dull your spark.

Stillness doesn’t always resource us in the ways that we need. It doesn’t rewire how we respond to uncertainty. It doesn’t restore our connection to awe, meaning, or possibility. It doesn’t teach us how to stay alive to ourselves when the future feels unrecognizable.

When I left my 9-to-5 and got quiet, I wasn’t more connected. I wasn’t more creative. I wasn’t any closer to figuring things out. I was trying to meet chaos with calm when what I really needed was connection to beauty, to aliveness, to meaning. Not silence for the sake of silence, but something that could actually resource me.

We are wildly unprepared for a future that doesn’t resemble the one we were promised. No one taught us how to adapt when the plan evaporates. Or how to reorient when the path disappears. We’re under-resourced, overstimulated, and quietly unraveling.

What we need isn’t more stillness. It’s more spark.

We need wonder. Sensory richness. Encounters with beauty. Not because they’re cute or aesthetic, but because they’re grounding. Because they wake us up and offer us the chance to feel something again.

We don’t need to escape reality, we need to stay with it in a new way.

Tiny moments of wonder are not fluff. They’re training. They’re how we practice aliveness, build psychological flexibility, and keep going when everything else feels flattened, uncertain, and unrecognizable. They’re how we reconnect with the parts of ourselves that feel capable and creative again.

They don’t just soothe. They rewire. They re-source.

And when the world feels disorienting and everything inside you is going dim, that’s not the time to shut down. It’s the time to plug in to what’s rich, and real, and deeply human.

I’m not saying that plugging into awe magically solves everything. But it does crack open a window. It lets in light. And when the world feels heavy or disorienting or stuck, even that tiny bit of light can help us remember we have agency.