Ahh, feeling dead inside. For some of us it’s a phase—like “Sad Autumn Girl” who whispers “it’s the season” as a rather brilliant justification for ennui … and for others, this dead inside business is an amusingly oxymoronic way of life.

Whether you’re feeling a wee-bit dead inside or a big-bit dead inside, you’re all welcome to this slumber party of sorrows. Just kidding! You’re all still invited, but it’s not about sorrow. It’s about lasering in on your sources of deadness and then amputating the necrotic tissue. So it’s a dismembering slumber party? Obviously it’s going to be wildly popular so secure your tickets now.

Compare ‘n Contrast: Living Like You Mean It vs. Living Like You’re a Wee Bit Dead Inside

• 🤗 The pursuit of astonishing aliveness . . . living lives we’d be proud to look back on without the faintest whiff of regret on our eventual deathbeds. Living like we mean it summons up the courage to start things over—like jobs, friendships, marriages, partnerships, the towns we live in, hairdos—even (especially) when it’s out of our comfort zones to do so.
• ☠️ Living in that comfort zone that’s so undeniably and ironically uncomfortable . . . working at jobs we merely tolerate (been there), lamenting our unused vacation time (done that), thinking we’ll start knitting again or work up to doing 10 pushups or really learning to speak French once and for all—but without a plan to actually do any of it as the pages of the calendar flip by.

• 🤗 Playing to win . . . like putting your name in the ring for that juicy promotion, signing up for Toastmasters, entering the race, taking risks of any kind or size, giving things that matter ALL—not a self-protective fraction—of our effort.
• ☠️ Playing not to lose . . . which looks like succumbing to the play-it-safe mentality of “I’d better not put myself out there; Tom’s got a better chance of getting the gig anyways.”

• 🤗 Playing till the buzzer . . . playing full-out right until the end. The end of what? The game, the Q3 strategy, the recital, the assignment, the two weeks’ notice period, the relationship, THE LIFE.
• ☠️ Playing till the going gets tough . . . quitting early because it’s hard or inconvenient or we are afraid of looking like an ass.

• 🤗 Adopting a healthy attitude towards failure . . . like knowing how to dust ourselves off and learn from our inevitable cockups.
• ☠️ Believing that failure is a shameful indictment on our deeply flawed character . . . which will keep us shrink-wrapped versions of our amazing selves until the day we die.

• 🤗 A life full of variety . . .  what with it being the spice of life and all. This looks like a willingness to shake shit up every now and then and try the squid ink pasta.
• ☠️ Anchored by routines and habits . . . that make our weeks feel like they’re passing us by in an “every day is the same” kind of blur.

• 🤗 Saying yes to life . . . like last-minute concert in the park invitations, yes to the butterfly-inducing dreams like selling our stuff on Etsy, yes to our friend’s not-easy-to-get-to wedding in Turks and Caicos, yes to things that aren’t always convenient but almost always lead to a vitally alive existence.
• ☠️ Riddled with a lot of no’s . . . and sofa time and what-if’s and regrets-in-the-making.

• 🤗 A conscious reprioritization of what really matters in life . . . a deliberate reshuffling of how we spend our time, attention, and energy.
• ☠️ A conspicuous absence of intention . . . that characterizes a dead-inside life (i.e.: floating down the lazy river of life). Many clients I have worked with lament letting their lives happen to them, of letting their careers, for example, unfold in ways that leave them wondering, “how did I end up here, working for Tom after all these years?” It can be easy to fall asleep at the switch of life.

• 🤗 The epitome of positive psychology . . . doing what it takes to flourish and live a life worth living. This also looks like knowing it’s within our control to go after this version of a life that lights us up from the inside out.
• ☠️ The antithesis of positive psychology . . . being okay to just “get by” and settle, or worse, feeling like empower-less victims who are destined to be stuck in the raw sewage of life until we die—and maybe even in death, too.

After reading through the compare ‘n contrast points above, were you leaning towards the Living Like You Mean It bullet points, or more towards Living Like You’re a Wee Bit Dead Inside? Maybe there was one glaring Dead Inside section that made you feel feelings—and not of the “I love this about me!” sort? That’s okay. You’re not alone. The first step towards living in a state of aliveness is to astutely note your observations about where you’re already living like you mean it vs. where you are a wee bit dead inside.

I find it helps to normalize our Dead Inside kerfuffles and tendencies in life. We have such good intentions to live like we mean it, to live these full and rich lives, and then all too often we let the rest of life get in the way. We get busy . . . reports need writing and the tires need rotating. We get tired . . . kids wake us up at three thirty in the morning and by Friday evening we just want to stay in, ideally in a horizontal position with a remote control in hand. We get scared . . . intimidated to jostle the routines and rhythms of our narrow but comfortingly predictable lives. How many of us have slacked off with our bodies, our relationships, our goals, our hobbies, our joie de vivre? How many of us feel rather clumsy at living? How many of us have slipped into a lifestyle unbecoming of someone fortunate enough to still be alive? Taking life for granted because that’s just what we do?

Okay so here is where I’m going to answer my own question, about how many of us have phoned it in with our lives, so to speak: ALL OF US. We do this because that’s what people do. Some of us slack off with our lives more than others, sure, but this is a judgment-free-zone kind of necrotic-tissue-dismembering slumber party and I don’t care if you’re Queen or King of the Living Dead . . . I just want you to know there’s hope. We can stop the squandering. We can un-dead our lives.

And so now your job is to highlight the bullet point(s) causing the deadness … and start the amputation. Deal?