How to Keep Going When Meaning Disappears

Have you ever heard someone say, “God broke the mould when they made that one”?

I’ve always loved that idea.

And yet—we’re quick to think it about other people, and just as quick to forget it about ourselves.

Especially when we’re down, or when life isn’t going our way.

But here’s the truth:

You are the broken mould.

The 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms that make you will never be assembled in this way again.

You are a cathedral of stardust—each particle older than the Earth, each arranged once and only once in the miracle that is you.

And not even the stars know how they did it.

I am thinking about this because part of life is learning to break your own mould.

Somewhere along the way, we settle into fixed versions of who we are—and convince ourselves the road is already run.

And yet, part of the spiritual challenge—in life and in art—is to discover who we are when the map runs out.

Because the end of the road isn’t an end at all—it’s a rite of passage.

We all hit dead ends.
We all hit walls.
We all feel shockingly negative about ourselves at points along the way.

Sometimes so much that we lose heart that there is anything good left out there for us at all.

We are called to recreate ourselves, and yet shedding skins is so tough; they seem to cling to you.

To get them off, you need to shrug.

Yet sometimes to shrug, you have to recover the faith that it is worth it do so in the first place.

The question, then, is how do you manage this cosmic shrug when you're out of kilter, your energy has vanished, or your hardline into meaning has dissolved?

For me, I approach it in three ways.

The first is accepting that both the forming and breaking of moulds are part of life’s pattern.

The walls we reach, the dead ends we encounter, and the sense that our work is going unnoticed are rarely what they seem—they’re just waypoints on the path.

They may not get easier to overcome, but you can prepare better for their arrival.

Reality has its cosmic elements—but brutish ones too. So the question is: what does that brutality make of you? Bitter? Withdrawn? Resigned?

Or is it rather your opportunity?

Since life’s ebb and flow will inevitably bring you to its lowest point, the truest test is who you find waiting there.

Who do you meet in that moment?

This isn’t about offering false optimism when life feels like it might break you—it’s about walking through it with deeper recognition.

Preparation isn’t just knowing the crevasse exists—it’s carrying the tools to climb out if you fall in.

Because perhaps the most important moment in your life is when you do.

That is when you find out who you really are.

When all the gods and fates are stacked against you, when your spirit is shattered and your strength has faded, you're left with one question:

Who am I, really?

Personally, I find it helps to carry a little of that stardust in my pocket—by which I mean the ability to reconnect with meaning beyond wants, expectations, or desires.

Being always able to reconnect to that is something holy and something worth fighting for in yourself, too.

It is rarely — and especially nowadays — just a given though.

The act of revolutionising your own perception when it is faltering is daily work — and drawn out over time, a life task.

The mould I mentioned earlier? It’s the dead skin that separates you from the essence of things.

Sometimes, when I meet someone cynical, I have the sense that they are bound by the deadweight of a skin they never managed to shed. Or maybe, somewhere along the way, without even noticing, they let that skin become them.

It is why I am always on guard about cynical thoughts in myself.

We all have them.

The question is: can you catch them?

Can you challenge the part of you that looks down on others, that feels threatened by the purity of someone’s energy, or has divorced itself from the belief that good things can happen?

When we notice these things, we can either hate ourselves for thinking them in the first place, or intercept them.

Catching them means bringing your creative potential to the darkest part of yourself.

For me, that’s spiritual power—the courage to meet yourself in miniature.

And that begins with simply noticing what’s happening inside you.

Because part of the path is confronting the uglier parts of yourself.

The trouble with the modern world is that we take zero accountability for it.

We compensate for our own shadows by judging others, broadcasting their flaws, or propping ourselves up on moral pedestals—cancelling anyone we disagree with.

Without even noticing, we became a society of madmen, without ever seeming to see our own place in the lunatic pantheon.

No, it’s all in you first and foremost.

The trouble is that by losing ourselves in the endless distraction we do simply that: lose ourselves.

It may seem a paradox, but we only start moving forward again once we catch what is actually in us.

To start, you have to first stop.

Self inquiry is an ungodly fire, but it’s exactly that fire that cracks off the mouldy skin.

Underneath?

Damn, it’s vulnerable.

But isn’t it something?
To feel again?
To get back to that sensitivity that reacts to everything in the outside world again?

One thing I’ve tried to do—within the absurd choice to live a creative life—is to accelerate the cycles.

I don’t mean this as an effort to accelerate life, or to try to get somewhere faster.

It’s about recognising that, when it comes to the ship I’m on, the ebbs and lows aren’t just part of the process—they are the process itself.

It doesn’t mean there’s no balance.

It just means that balance is defined different — as the state of mind that lets you live within the ocean’s arc itself.

Ebb. Flow. Point. Counterpoint.

Balance, not as desperate hope that the calm comes, but in acceptance of the storm.

I’ve been meditating on all this because I recently found myself confronted by a paradox in my own life.

On one hand, I’ve felt I’m in a good process this year—living up to something I long hoped to do, especially with the music I’ve been releasing each month.

And yet, even within that progress, I’ve been hit by deep troughs.

How paradoxical and confusing life can be — that we live within such experiences and extremes simultaneously!

I realised that there was some type of clash going on within me, and felt I needed to confront it.

We avoid these confrontations, I think, because they can feel like violent eruptions.

The things we have been avoiding crash into us when we stop; and so it has been with me.

But these silent internal clashes are exactly how the forgotten parts of our lives—and of ourselves—finally catch up with us.

And so, I stopped awhile—and let a few demons catch up. It felt good—to turn and face them, to see that we’d worn each other out in the chase, and that meeting was the better way forward.

Here’s the thing:

I know that, on many levels, I’m turning this year a long-held vision into life.

I’m proud of that.

But part of pursuing a vision is that you sometimes drift from it.

Along the way, you might need to return to it, or adjust course as you grow — or life asks something new of you.

Responding to what life is asking of you gets harder the more distracted you are—which is why so many of us struggle to act on the change we feel in our gut but can’t quite hear in our minds.

What I am doing this week is this:

I am clarifying my vision.

To do this, I have to audit not just what I am doing but how I am being.

When I do a self-audit, I try to invite everything in.

What I mean by this is that many of us busy ourselves because it is easier to do so than to see what it is we are actually trying to escape.

Auditing yourself means having the courage to stop—sometimes even mid-flow—and let the demons catch up.

Because here’s the thing: those wild, mental demons carry the good stuff.
We need what they have to say. But to hear it, we have to turn and face them.

To make a change — you have to start really listening to yourself again.