This is a copy of the newsletter that was sent out on November 7th, 2025.
We’re a few short weeks from the new year, which means you’ll soon start thinking about resolutions. This isn’t the subject of today’s message, though.
I want to talk about something deeper. Something that sits underneath all the habits you hope to change. It concerns the idea of losing everything you value and still being here. It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but it matters. A lot.
Most people believe that if they lost everything, their lives would end in every way except physically. The sense of being “someone” would disappear. When everything familiar is taken away from you, you’re left with a feeling of being cut off from the world while still being fully aware. In that moment, your mind keeps searching for control, but there’s little if any.
It is the deep structure of the common anxiety about the future. The fear is about continuing to exist but no longer being able to move inside your own life.
This is what makes the topic so difficult. It raises questions most people would rather not face until the moment they have to. Loss itself is not the main problem. Everyone loses. The real problem is the feeling of being alive without the ability to effectively respond. This can happen physiologically or psychologically.
People who lived through locked-in syndrome describe it as being buried inside their body. They can think, see, sense, and hear, but they can’t communicate back. The reliable system that once allowed intention to become action is dormant. They participate in reality without their consent.
A similar psychological version of this pattern appears in everyday life when your identity depends entirely on what you own or what you do. And we all know how fragile that is. Everything can change. Everything eventually does. No one is protected from finding themselves on the receiving end of misfortune. Most of us, sooner or later, take our turn being caught between the hammer and the anvil.
When someone says, “That will never happen to me,” I get the same uneasy feeling you probably do. It usually means they haven’t thought it through, which makes the inevitable impact worse when it finally comes.
Your job could abruptly be terminated. Your career can become irrelevant as fast as technology changes. Your spouse can end up with someone else. Your child can get pulled into trouble you never saw coming. The bank, the divorce or a brutal force of nature, can take your home. Your health can change overnight. These aren’t rare events. People shrug them off with “that will never happen to me,” yet these things happen every single day to someone, somewhere. Bad luck takes turns. You’re on the list too.
Loss can come suddenly, or it can arrive slowly, piece by piece, until you wake up one morning and realize your life has changed beyond recognition.
And it is frightening. It truly is. It is even more terrifying than death itself. This fear stems from the realization that you may continue to exist, yet cease to live.
When your job ends unexpectedly, or your partner leaves you, or you experience the disruption of familiar routines you relied on to battle anxious thoughts, something in you freezes, because you were not prepared. The surface structure collapses, and you no longer know what to aim at or where to place your attention. This process creates the sense of staying here without a real sense of direction.
If you look closely, what disappears is the surface layer: the background, props, habits, definitions, and roles that shaped your daily life.
Now let’s try to flip the script.
You never owned your car, your house, your job, your children, or your spouse. You only held temporary access to them.
You enjoyed the feeling of safety they created. But none of them were ever “yours” in any permanent sense. If they could follow you beyond death, it would be a different story. They cannot.
Under that surface structure sits a deeper layer that shapes your experience. That layer decides what you notice, how you interpret events, and what those events mean to you.
When your life feels steady, you don’t notice the deeper layer that shapes how you see things. It stays in the background. But the moment something in your world breaks, even a small thing, that deeper layer shows itself. You notice the cracks in how you’ve been holding everything together. It hits you hard, because you weren’t ready for your sense of stability to shake. There’s no simple way to avoid that moment. It arrives whether you want it or not.
This isn’t a conversation about being positive or grateful or resilient. I’m trying to point at something else. The things you own and the roles you hold don’t create the meaning in your life, and losing them doesn’t change that meaning. As we just discussed, some form of loss is already built into the deal of being alive. Loss is guaranteed.
Meaning comes from the way your mind arranges the world and shows it to your awareness. Change that arrangement, and the same world feels different to you, instantly. The surface structures can be distorted, exchanged, demolished, restructured, or created from scratch.
So if you lost everything tomorrow, you would still have the one part that keeps creating your reality. This is the deep structure that filters and interprets the world around you. You can leave it unchanged, repeating old patterns, or you can shape it with intention. You may only choose what matters now, not what mattered before.
Once you see this, the question “Now what?” becomes less about panic and more about intention. You understand that the quality of your life (your subjective experience, in essence) comes mostly from something other than the circumstances. It primarily stems from the mental framework that organizes those circumstances.
This is why some people stay functional in awful conditions, while others fall apart when their car will not start in the morning.
When you start noticing that deeper structure, the whole world becomes a set of clues for you to study.
You lost everything tomorrow. Now what? Try a better question:
If attention is your only tool, where would you point it now?
By the way, you can intentionally direct your attention by practicing the Cartesian Coordinates.
Ok. That’s enough seriousness for one day. Go do something extraordinary.
I hope that’s helpful.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht