The One Thing I Got Wrong About "Follow Your Bliss"

Figuring this one thing out changed everything for me.

Let’s be real: after enough living it’s easy to come to the conclusion that directives like “follow your bliss” are bullshit. The simple equation of do what you love = successful and happy life seems to only work out for a vaunted few. The rest of us mere mortals are just trying to survive each day with our sanity intact. We’re lucky if we have any energy left over to follow our bliss – if we even know what our bliss is. I used to think I knew. For me, it’s writing. But somewhere along the way it stopped being my bliss. After years of struggling to make something of my writing, my joy in it had evaporated. All meaning I’d found in it was gone; I no longer knew why I was bothering to do it at all. Eventually my burnout became so extreme I was unable to write. But I’m stubborn, and I still believed that I was meant to be a writer. That’s when I realized I had a fundamental misunderstanding of “follow your bliss.” It’s not bullshit after all – I’d just been doing it wrong.

The one thing I’d failed to understand about “follow your bliss” is that my bliss is incompatible with success and happiness as those are defined within our capitalist system. I know what you’re thinking. Sure, some people do succeed within that system by following their passion. A friend of mine built a lucrative party catering business from one hotdog cart. So what’s his secret? Nothing more than this: his bliss already fit the system. He’s an extraverted natural salesman. Me? I’m an introverted creative. Creative work by its very nature does not fit the system: it’s generative rather than productive, emerges on a slower schedule than what is profitable, and creative products don’t have a large market. It’s rare for creatives to make a living from their work – not impossible, but very, very difficult. And in order to do so, it often involves a sacrifice that kills their creative capacities.

The incommensurability between creative work and conventional work may seem obvious, but for creatives who are struggling to fit both in, or better yet find paying work that allows for at least some creativity, things get muddied. The problem is that creative work gets relegated to the leftover time and spaces, after the productive, money-earning work is done. And this never ends well for creatives, because it means that who they are is diminished and confined to the leftovers. When I finally understood that this two-track life would never lead to anywhere but burnout for me, everything changed. I realized I needed to shift the lens through which I experienced life. I will always have to earn money somehow, but I wanted to find a way to live from my creative center in everything I did, because that’s the only way my spirit could regenerate and thrive. I call this whole-life creativity, and it showed me what “follow your bliss” really means.

It should be called “living your bliss,” because that’s what it is, and I believe that’s how Joseph Campbell, the originator of the saying, meant it. He saw it as a state of being in which you have fully committed to manifesting an expression of your true self in the world. This is similar to what Brené Brown terms “wholehearted living,” but Campbell, a scholar of world mythologies, saw it as having an esoteric and spiritual dimension. He conceptualized the experience of following your bliss as being on your destined track, where your life is harmonized with what the universe wants for you. He alternatively called this state of being “refreshment” or “rapture,” that feeling of being truly alive. So following your bliss isn’t really about doing what you love – it’s about experiencing the act of living from that creative well of life itself, the place where wonder, astonishment, and joy come from. We can access that place through doing what we love, that is, doing the thing that allows us to speak the language of our soul into the world.

I used to think that following your bliss was hard, something only a lucky few got to do, but that was because I was forcing myself to accept and pursue the values of the conventional capitalist system while simultaneously attempting to keep the flame of my creative spirit alive – and I failed at both. But it was only when my creative flame finally burned out that I became truly capable of following my bliss, because I had nothing else to lose at that point. I committed myself fully to living from my creative center. This involves a tremendous amount of trust, both in myself and the universe, because it’s risky in every way: financially, emotionally, relationally, reputationally. Full commitment means entering a territory of total and uncharted uncertainty. You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy steps off the cliff? That’s what it feels like. It’s petrifying. But I still find it easier than splitting myself between my creative soul and my false conventional self. It took descending into that dark place of being confronted with my own failures and despair to gain the perspective I needed to start living my bliss.

We all have our own journeys and no one’s individual path looks like anyone else’s. But creatives come across similar obstacles on their way, and the biggest is trying to live their bliss in a society undergirded by a system that does not support the creative life. It’s an obstacle that reappears again and again, but we can diminish its power to block and divert us by claiming, and committing to, our identities as creatives. It’s okay if this happens in stages – in fact the daily devotional act of living from your creative center is, in large part, what it means to be a creative. Simply making the decision to try that today and the next day and onward is how you can begin to follow your bliss.