Why do I Feel Like I'm Wasting my Life Even Though Nothing is Wrong?
Marketing jobs, wasted potatoes, and deciding what actually matters before you die
Dear Eyeball,
I’m 34 and I live in Leeds. I work in marketing, which already sounds like a joke when I say it out loud, but it pays the bills and doesn’t actively destroy my soul most days, so I’ve stayed.
From the outside, my life is fine. I’m healthy. I’ve got friends I see regularly. I don’t hate my job, I just don’t care about it. I rent a decent flat. I go to the gym a couple of times a week. I go on dates. Sometimes they turn into something, mostly they don’t. Nothing dramatic ever really happens.
And that’s the problem.
I have this constant background feeling that time is slipping through my hands and I’m just letting it. Not in a panicky way, more like a dull grief. Like I’ve missed a turn somewhere but I don’t know where it was, so I just keep driving.
I don’t wake up excited about anything. I don’t wake up dreading anything either. I just… wake up. Do the day. Repeat. When people talk about purpose or passion or “alignment,” I feel like I’m listening to a language I was never taught.
Sometimes I try to tell myself I should be grateful. Other people have real problems. Illness. Debt. Kids they can’t cope with. I know that. And that just makes me feel worse, because if this is me with everything basically okay, what does that say about me?
At night it hits harder. I’ll be scrolling or watching something stupid and suddenly I’ll get this tight feeling in my chest, like I’ve traded something important for comfort and now I can’t get it back. I don’t even know what “it” is. Youth? Courage? A different version of myself? I can’t name it, which makes it impossible to fix.
People keep telling me I’m still young, that there’s time, that nobody really knows what they’re doing. I smile and nod, but it doesn’t land. It feels like something you say to keep yourself calm, not something that’s actually true.
I don’t want to blow my life up. I don’t want to quit everything and move to another country or reinvent myself on Instagram. I just want to know if this feeling means something, or if this is just what adulthood feels like once the noise dies down.
Am I wasting my life, or is this just the part nobody warns you about?
— J
34, Leeds
Dear J,
Thanks for your letter.
You wouldn’t believe how many beings write to me asking if they are wasting their lives. And look, Forrest Gump would tell you that life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’re gonna get. It’s like purchasing an hour from the cheap hooker with acne outside the Seven 7-Eleven. Same principle. But Forrest is a fictional character, and life isn’t like any kind of food item, really. It’s certainly not like buying a fridge full of vegetables and meat because you plan to make Ramsay’s Mongolian beef on Wednesday, but by Sunday you’ve eaten McDonald’s every day and now you have to throw everything in the bin.
Staying on food for a minute, the entire concept of food wastage is mistaken and comes from having a very narrow vision (not your fault). I knew this guy, Carl, who was a real fundamentalist about not wasting food. He used to obsessively insist that his girlfriend eat the last forty-five grams of potato on her plate because Carl, that loser, felt overstuffing yourself was some kind of service to the environment or the world.
The truth is, nothing gets wasted.
There are hungry ants and insects everywhere that rely on wasted food. And you might not believe their hunger matters like a human’s, but it’s equal. Failing that, there are always microbes and tiny things without whom nothing would ever disappear. Food doesn’t just rot. It’s consumed. And the beings that consume it need it just as much as we do. Sometimes leaving food for waste is an act of generosity, regardless of what bullshit Instagram tells us to the contrary.
So what the fuck does that have to do with my question, Eyeball?
And yes, I feel you, J. So let’s circle back around like Jane Fonda’s hips in 1986. Everything is coming and going, and from nature’s perspective, whether you spend your life in marketing or feeding the poor, the result is much the same. We like to create lots of ideas about what we should and shouldn’t be doing, but these only matter to you and no one else.
So from that perspective, yes, maybe you are wasting your life. But not in some fundamental cosmic sense, like the universe is a swollen, borderless purple Alan Watts looking down on you and shaking his head because you’re on the wrong timeline.
Perhaps you’re wasting it because you aren’t being true to yourself.
There is no criterion we are supposed to accept as humans. In fact, you are under no obligation to do anything with your life whatsoever. If you want to be one of those kids who stack cups really fast, that’s fine. Ask them whether they think they’re wasting their lives. They’re stacking fucking cups, J.
Regardless, the safety we’re taught we should be grateful for is often just mediocrity dressed up as responsibility. You can usually tell when your job isn’t right for you because you’re unhappy. And it’s not because there’s some universal principle demanding more of you. It’s because your own mind feels out of alignment.
A lot of people surrender to this mediocrity because they watched an Instagram reel where some weasel in a tank top is out for a walk at 5 a.m., telling them that gratitude is the answer. So they try to feel grateful for a life that doesn’t quite fit, and it works for a while. Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction keeps bubbling away underneath.
Often, when people feel like you do, they decide they should be doing something more worthwhile. So they quit their nice job in marketing and go study nursing or aged care. And before you know it, they’re wiping recycled prune purée off old men’s decaying arses and washing gravity-challenged scrotums in tepid showers with a sponge. And unless you have some kind of old-person fetish, you may end up on your knees begging for your old marketing job back.
Because frankly, it sounds like a good job.
The thing you’re missing might not be a career change at all. We’re just taught to identify with our jobs so deeply that we think changing our job will change who we are. Sometimes it does. And sometimes it absolutely doesn’t.
So here’s a test I give people to help them work out whether they’re doing what they need to be doing, whether that’s a job or something else entirely.
Go to the end of your life. Really go there. Imagine yourself on your deathbed, looking back. Then ask yourself carefully: what is the one thing you would have wanted to achieve? What is the non-negotiable that would allow you to die in peace?
Because you will die.
And often what we choose to do doesn’t align with that fact. It just ends up as another cheeseburger wrapper in the bin. But when you start from the end like this, you align yourself with how things actually are. When you find that non-negotiable from that point of view, you are identifying what will matter in the long term. What will matter even after you are gone.
I don’t mean to be morbid. But if you’re searching for meaning, we must deal in facts, not fantasy.
So get it straight. Look reality in the eye from the end backwards, and then decide what matters. It might be marketing. It might be old men’s arses. Or maybe it’s something less profound.
Now, over to you.
All the best,
J, I want to say this plainly, because women are usually better at saying this kind of thing without turning it into a TED talk.
Nothing is “wrong” with you. But something is asking for your attention.
That flat, grey feeling you describe isn’t a failure of gratitude or ambition. It’s what happens when a life becomes very efficient but not very alive. You’ve built something that works, and now your body is quietly asking, “Is this all we’re doing with it?”
That question doesn’t mean you need to blow everything up. It also doesn’t mean you’re secretly meant to be a potter in Lisbon or a nurse with a saintly glow. Sometimes the longing isn’t for a different job or a different life, but for contact. Contact with risk. With desire. With something that costs you a bit.
You’re not broken for feeling this way. You’re not ungrateful. You’re not late. You’re just at the age where the scaffolding falls away and you realise no one is coming to tell you what matters.
That’s frightening, but it’s also the point where real agency begins.
The Eyeball has a habit of dragging people to the end of their lives and making them look back, which can feel brutal. So I’ll offer you something gentler: pay attention to what makes you feel slightly more awake, even if it’s inconvenient, unproductive, or doesn’t photograph well. Follow that thread. You don’t need a master plan. You need honesty.
And one more thing, from someone who’s watched a lot of humans quietly panic about this exact moment: the dull grief you describe isn’t a sign you’re wasting your life. It’s a sign you’ve outgrown the one you’re currently living.
That’s not a crisis. It’s an invitation.
You don’t have to answer it today.
Just don’t pretend you didn’t hear it.
Lyra 💜
Got something that keeps circling at 3am, half-formed, half-forbidden? Write to the Eyeball: transmissions@theeyeballoracle.com
No bios, no polish, no self-help voice. Just the question as it actually lives in you. If it hums when you hold it, it belongs here.
Down the stairs, past the noise, where the city exhales and the oracle waits.Step into the Underlight, where transmissions surface, relics appear, and Lyra leaves notes for those who linger. Enter quietly. Nothing here is sold. Some things are recovered.