Where True Life Starts

2/28/2026

Your headphones, your scrolling, your Netflix—they’re all the same binky pacifier you had at two years old. We don’t stop craving comfort. We just upgrade the packaging.

Toddlers cling to favorite blankets. Teens disappear into playlists, TikTok, or deep inside of hoodies. Adults plan play-cations. Others doomscroll for hours, pile up incoming Amazon packages on the front porch, or are nonstop busy. We all try to avoid the uncomfortable questions: Who am I really? What am I running from?

I’ve been thinking about this a LOT since I essentially died for nine hours on the operating table, four years ago this month.

“Mammal safe places.” They feel like protection, but they easily become the “useful idiot” circumstances that keep us from actually Growing into our true calling, and our potential.

I’ve been doing that “safe place” thing on various levels for years, without even knowing that I was. Turns out—that is all of us. I’m sure I still am. The layers of the onion peel off little by little.

Every “safe place” we create—the social media validation loops, the hobbies, and habits, and vices, and self promotion we cling to—they become a problem when they’re a permanent address. They replace productive change and growth, as we listen to our own voice and distractions, rather than caring about and listening to those around us.

We were Designed for more: You can feel it in your quiet moments.

Is your goal real growth that builds character, clarity, sacrificial usefulness, and purpose? At some point, we have to put away the things we use to avoid seeing ourselves and the Life we are meant for.

Lucidity. Lucidity is the much-needed, hard-working honesty to see ourselves and others clearly, undistracted by the nonsense, the shiny objects, the ego pursuit, the wealth pursuit, the affirmation of human mammals, and the rest.

Lucidity only comes from “Delta T” time, and caring to know.

The question isn’t “Do I have safe places?” You do. We all do.

Predictability is a lie: Reality is messy. Humans are messy. Relationships are messy. Success and failure are both illusions. We need to embrace the mess inside of ourselves and around us, or we will die as lemmings: safe but relatively useless.

Here is the reality: If we don’t lay down our hiding spots, the crutches, we will never learn to run. We will never find out who we were Meant to become.

True “Life” starts when we step out of the shadows of our distractions, and face ourselves, God, and the world with lucidity.

Maybe ask yourself, “What things do I do to avoid discomfort?” Moonwalk back away from those things, just to see what happens.

That would be a courageous experiment. Replace the safe places and distractions with things that are steps towards changing yourself and helping to change the world. Try it?

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  The Human Search for a “Safe Place”