In this episode, David Elikwu explains the pervasive state of hesitation many people experience in life. Drawing upon philosophers Henry David Thoreau and Soren Kierkegaard, David explores the concept of living in a foggy state of quiet desperation, paralysed by the fear of finality and the countless possibilities life offers. He discusses the modern parallel of FOMO (fear of missing out), and how this keeps people from fully committing to their choices.
David suggests a vow of total engagement as the cure, advocating for complete dedication and passion in every action, much like a focused bonfire. He shares wisdom from Zen master Shunryu Suzuki and Michelangelo's approach to sculpting as metaphors for living a fully committed life.
David challenges listeners to engage fully in one task today, emphasising the importance of closing the gap between potential and action to achieve inner integrity. David also promotes his book, 'Sovereign', and invites listeners to pre-order and attend upcoming events in London.
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📄 Show notes:
00:00 The Foggy State Between Sleep and Wakefulness
00:27 Living in Quiet Desperation
01:49 The Fear of Finality and Hesitation
03:03 The Modern Dilemma: FOMO and Optionality
04:25 The Paradox of Choice and Its Impact
05:19 The Art of Total Engagement
06:43 The Power of Passion and Commitment
10:13 The Challenge of Being Present
14:46 A Simple Challenge for Today
15:46 Conclusion and Upcoming Events
Embracing Total Engagement: Overcoming Life's Hesitations
Have you ever found yourself in that strange, foggy zone between sleep and wakefulness when your alarm blares through the morning silence? It's a space where you're conscious of the day's demands yet not fully present, compelling you to hit snooze and drift in that limbo. This state isn't limited to just those first 30 minutes of the morning; many of us live our entire lives in this suspended state. Henry David Thoreau once lamented that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. This isn't a modern affliction but a pervasive human condition marked by hesitation.
Breaking the Chains of Hesitation
Hesitation, rooted in a philosophical fear of finality, paralyzes us. Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century philosopher, described the "dizziness of freedom" as the overwhelming weight of life's possibilities, leaving us incapable of choosing any path. This ancient dilemma has a modern name: FOMO, or the fear of missing out. As we scroll through our phones, we're reminded of a thousand other lives we could lead, imprisoning ourselves in hedged bets instead of embracing the lives before us. We attempt to keep all doors ajar, paralyzed by the fear of closing them.
The Paradox of Choice and the Call to Engage Fully
Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice" and Eric Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" discuss how infinite options induce anxiety rather than freedom. The snooze button life is powered by this paradox, coaxing us into complacency. The cure lies in a vow of total engagement, the art of going all in, and living with radiant intensity. Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki encourages us to "burn ourselves completely," suggesting a life lived with fervent commitment and purpose, akin to a bonfire's sustaining warmth.
Carving Out the Life You Wish to Lead
Michelangelo, when sculpting David, saw the angel within the marble and chipped away until he set it free. This is true commitment: an act of subtraction rather than addition, courageously carving away all that is not your chosen path to liberate true potential. The ancient Romans understood this as "age quod agis"—do what you are doing. Engage with the full intensity of your being and let your actions become one with your values.
Finding Passion in Suffering
Passion, derived from the Latin "pati" meaning to suffer, is not about finding what you love and then working. Instead, it's about engaging in work that leads you to love it. Passionate endeavor involves hardship; it survives the trials and tribulations of life. It's about being willing to suffer for something that matters.
Commitment: The Source of Inner Integrity
The reward for such total engagement isn't a fleeting happiness but a profound state of being—a unified self where your actions align with your values. This inner integrity radiates as warmth and light, like the bonfire Suzuki describes. It's a life fully lived. Some might fear that burning this brightly could lead to burnout. Yet energy, once embraced wholeheartedly, perpetuates itself. Divided efforts drain us; wholehearted commitment empowers.
The Challenge: Light Your Fire
Choosing wisely where to direct this intense dedication is crucial. Not every path is worth the burn, yet learning to ignite your fire is the first step before directing it wisely. So, start small. For today, choose one task—be it cooking dinner, reading a book to your child, or completing a work task—and go all in. Turn off the snooze on life's alarm, rise, and fully embrace the task at hand.
Conclusion: Rise and Engage
This commitment requires courage and a willingness to be present in each moment. As you carve away the marble block of life, focus on freeing what truly matters, reducing distractions, and finding passion in the pursuit. Rise awake, you sleeper, and live the life you are meant to live, leaving hesitation aside. For a truly engaged life awaits.
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
[00:00:00]
The Foggy State Between Sleep and Wakefulness
David Elikwu: You know that feeling, that strange, foggy state between sleep and wakefulness when your alarm's gone off. You are conscious enough to know what time it is and what you have to do that day, but you are not yet fully present. So you hit snooze and you drift in that limbo for a little while.
It could be five minutes, it could be 30, it could on a Saturday or Sunday, be a few hours. You are in this limbo. You are not asleep. You are not truly awake.
Living in Quiet Desperation
David Elikwu: Now, what I'm describing might sound familiar as regards your first 30 minutes of the morning, but perhaps if you think deeper, you might realize that for you and many others, this describes how people live their entire lives.
Now you realize that a lot of people exist in this state of quiet desperation. They're conscious enough to navigate their days, but not engaged enough to truly live them.
And this isn't just merely some modern affliction because nearly two centuries ago, the writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in his [00:01:00] words that the massive man lead lives of quiet desperation.
And he continued saying they go to their graves with the song still in them, the song still in them now. This what Thoreau's describing is a life defined, not just by laziness, but really by a single pervasive characteristic. One of hesitation, but where does this hesitation come from? If we're all born in Thoreau's words with a song inside us, why are there so few of us singing?
Now, for a long time I thought that the enemy here, and as is the zeitgeist explanation was distraction, right? Distraction is the thing that gets in the way between where we are and the lives that we want to live. But the more I thought about it, I realized that the root cause is actually a lot deeper.
The Fear of Finality and Hesitation
David Elikwu: It's this profound philosophical fear. It's the fear of finality. The terror of the closed door. This is the force that stops us living life fully [00:02:00] and intentionally. Now in the 19th century, there was a Danish philosopher named Soren Kirkegaard, and he wrote this. He said that looking out at the infinite possibilities of your own life creates inside you this.
Kind of dizziness of freedom. Those were his words. Dizziness of freedom. This idea that the weight of all the lives that you could live becomes so heavy that it paralyzes you from starting the one that you have, right? The weight of all the lives you could possibly live paralyzes you from starting the one that you have.
You have this life that you could be inhabiting. This the way that you could be walking, the things that you could be doing, but. Because we are so fixated on the other things we could possibly be doing, the optionality of life, we are frozen, we're transfixed, and so you stand at this crossroads with a million paths lying open to you, but in the terror of choosing the wrong one, you choose none at all.
You just stand there hesitating.
And I mentioned, okay, he's a 19th century philosopher. You could toss this out of [00:03:00] hand and say, ah, this is just dusty philosophy. But actually, no.
The Modern Dilemma: FOMO and Optionality
David Elikwu: This ancient thread has a very modern counterpart that you are probably quite familiar with, which is fomo, right? The fear of missing out FOMO. It's a common phrase.
Now, every time that you scroll through your phone, you are confronted. With a thousand other lives that you could be living, right? You go on LinkedIn, you see everything, people celebrate. You go on Instagram, you see the way the lives that your contemporaries and your peers are living. You maybe follow the people that you once went to school with, whether it was primary school or secondary school, high school people that you went to university with or people that didn't go to university and you did, et cetera, et cetera.
And through this online panopticon, you see the thousand lives, the thousand other doors that you could be walking through. And so we hedge. We hedge in the lives that we are currently in. We try to, as much as possible, keep our options open.
We dabble, we refuse to commit because commitment means [00:04:00] closing doors. If you commit to this job, you might miss this other opportunity. If you commit to this relationship, you might miss the next person walking past. And there is this idea that's quite pervasive in the zeitgeist that closing a door is an admission secretly that we only have one life to live.
And I think a lot of us don't really want to accept that. We don't like this confrontation with our own mortality.
The Paradox of Choice and Total Engagement
David Elikwu: And this is also quite clear in modern research, there's this paradox of choice. I think there was a book by Barry Schwartz that's called The Paradox of Choice. Great book. I recommend it.
But the point is that this paradox of choice, it doesn't make us more free. It just makes us more anxious and less satisfied. It's the engine that powers the snooze button of life that we talked about earlier. Another book I highly recommend by Eric from, I think it's called Escape From Freedom.
Eric Fromm is a German philosopher and thinker. He's written a lot of great books on philosophy. I recommend a ton of them in my newsletter. The Knowledge, [00:05:00] great Time for a plug. Very spontaneous. Uh, the knowledge.io, I send a weekly newsletter. You can join us there and get a lot more. So, returning to this week's topic, if as we have discussed, we find ourselves paralyzed by the fear of closing doors, what's the cure?
What's the solution? In my mind, I think it's a vow of total engagement.
The Art of Going All In
David Elikwu: It's the art of going all in, and I think it, it's very lost these days and it's hard to. Pick apart this idea of being serious, this idea of being incredibly earnest of doing things, of putting a hundred percent into everything that you do, and chasing things with this sense of aliveness, this sense of ambition, right?
Having this radical belief that the intensity of your commitment is a virtue in and of itself, but this is what I would suggest is the cure. So there was a zen master Shunryu Suzuki, and he described this with a very powerful image.
He says, [00:06:00] when you do something, you should burn yourself completely like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself, burn yourself completely. This sounds, perhaps not the most pleasant image, but it's this. Sensation of being alive, this sensation of being fully consumed by the thing that you're doing not consumed, with the passion of a zealot and someone who is wild and out of control.
This is not a wildfire rambling through the mountains of California. It's a bonfire, right? A bonfire is something that keeps you warm. It's a sustaining flame. It gives you light, it gives you heat, it gives you energy. So Shunryu suzuki, he said. Consume yourself with this fire.
The Bonfire of Commitment
David Elikwu: Burn yourself completely.
Don't hold even a little bit in reserve. Don't save something for later. Think of, for example, the sculptor, Michelangelo. He looked at the block of marble and he famously said that he saw the angel in the marble and he carved until he set him pre. He was talking about the sculpture. David, who shares my name, although maybe I'm not so [00:07:00] picturesque now.
What Michelangelo is describing here, this is real commitment, right? It's not an act of addition. It's not the thing that you do, and then you do the next thing, and then you do the next thing. It's the opposite. It's an act of subtraction.
It is accepting that there is out there, all the things your life could possibly be. As you look at the marble block of your life, there is all the possible shapes that could be contained in that block. But you must be brave. You must carve away, you must chip away everything that is not your chosen path.
In order to liberate the one thing there really is. You don't get the sculpture of David without releasing the rest of the marble. You don't. Have to hold onto the optionality, right? That this fear that if you make the wrong chip, you make a mistake, then the David, the sculpture is lost. The beauty that could be the final product is lost.
And I think that is very much the energy and the idea that many of us have this idea that we are chip [00:08:00] chipping away at this fragile thing called life. And if you make one mistake, one wrong turn, one false chip, the entire thing will cble and fall apart. Now the ancient Romans had a simpler and much more direct command for this practice, this idea of burning yourself completely.
They had a phrase, age quod agis, right? It means do what you are doing. It's a simple phrase, but it's very profound. It's a challenge. Be where you are, work when you work, play when you play. Bring the totality of your being to the moment at hand, to the thing that you're putting your hand to, to the thing that you are working at.
Be earnest, be complete, be passionate. Right? In my book, sovereign, uh, always good to find a, a natural plug, but I talk about this idea of passion, right?
Finding Passion Through Suffering
David Elikwu: The origin of the word passion. Is pati, also Latin? It means to suffer. And I make the point when I'm describing it, that very often we, we start by assuming [00:09:00] that when you're trying to figure out what work to do and what your career and what your life should look like, that you need to start by finding something you're passionate about and then turning your work to it.
But actually it should be the opposite, right? There's a, the famous phrase, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. And it's that way for a reason. It's not the other way, right? It's not do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. The the point is that you don't start by doing what you already love.
You find what you love by doing the. That is a crucial distinction and, and that's partly what I was referencing. It's this idea when you look at the etymology of passion, right, pati, to suffer that passion is something worth suffering for something that is hard, something that is not easy. When you stare at the marble block, you might not see the complete picture of everything.
This thing could be, you don't know exactly where things will go, but you must cut, you must chip with some sense of finality in order to find the place that you are going to find the life that you are trying to build. The thing that you're looking for passion is [00:10:00] that which survives hardship. That's a quote from from the book, and you can get it by the way, if you go to become sovereign.com.
But passion is that which survives hardship. And so, we go back to this. Roman phrase, I get called Ag. This idea that we should do what we're doing and we accept that it's hard, right? It's very hard to be in the moment these days. You are distracted, you have TikTok, you have Instagram, you have all these different things.
It's hard. So why should you do it? Why should you undertake this challenge, this difficult art?
The Challenge of Total Engagement
David Elikwu: What is the prize that you get for this vow of total engagement? And in my mind, it's not just for this feeling of happiness or joy, but the real reward is a state of being. It's an inner integrity, and I think that's something that's completely lost these days, this search for internal integrity.
Because the snooze button, life is a fractured one. Your potential is here, but your actions are there. You are pulled in a dozen different [00:11:00] directions, and you feel whole in none of them. Casting that away and choosing to go all in is about closing that gap. It's about creating this profound, quiet peace that comes from becoming a whole and unified person.
A person where your, your values and your actions finally match. They finally become one. Integration. Integration, I think is, is a big key word. I think they talk a lot about it in Zen philosophy, many other Eastern practices as well. But I think the most beautiful thing about this internal integrity that we mentioned, it's that it has a, a radiance, a light, a warmth, right?
It is. The bonfire that Sheri Yu Suzuki was talking about, and this feeling to use the French phrase, joy de ViiV, it's the flame that comes from the bonfire. It's not the the fuel, it's, it's the evidence of a life that's fully lived. Now there's a very natural objection here.
If I burn that brightly, won't I burn out? If I [00:12:00] throw myself with exuberance and tremendous passion into everything, if I sacrifice everything right going back to this word, passion. Won't I burn out, won't I combust, right, what happens to my, my body, my bones, if I truly threw myself into this fire?
But I think this pushback reveals the central paradox here of energy. Energy begets energy. Okay. Now, you may have done these experiments in high school where you look at the light bulb and you see through, earlier types of light bulbs. Much of the energy is actually lost in the form of heat. Not much energy that you're putting in comes out as light.
What you want is the opposite. You want the light. And I think it, it's a similar pattern. It's the half-hearted effort that exhausts you when you lose a lot of your energy that you're putting into this bulb. You say that you're trying to turn the bulb on, but actually it's a lot of it's being lost as heat.
A lot of it's just being wasted. A lot of that energy just dissipates out into the ether because you are not really. Trying. You're not really concentrating. You're not actually [00:13:00] putting a hundred percent of your effort into this thing,
and it's the constant low grade anxiety of the divided mind. That's a psychic leak and it drains you dry. It's the light that loses its energy in heat. But the bonfire in its total commitment creates its own heat. It gets hot. Right, and the heat adds, it compounds, it has a purpose.
Now, of course, there's a master level skill here, which raises the question of wisdom, right? Choosing the right things to commit to because you could easily perhaps burn yourself out by, by choosing the wrong thing, by heading in the wrong direction. You don't necessarily want to burn that. The wrong thing to don't want to be consumed.
Have this flame. Completely for the wrong thing, right? You see many people that are obsessed with an ex, with a, with a partner, with a job that does, doesn't suit them any longer with a lifestyle that they want streamed of, but actually is, is completely tearing them apart. It's tearing apart the fabric of their life.
They have this [00:14:00] sense of. Ego, this sense of identity that is connected to a certain type of work that they do, and it's crushing their family, it's crushing their life. The things that they say that that are important to them are unsustainable. And so it's not to say that willy nilly without any sense of wisdom or curation, you could just commit to anything that you should just chase anything.
But I think the first step is actually just learning how to light the fire, how to chase something. Then once you know how to ignite the flame within yourself, you can channel that heat, channel that fire, and turn it in the right direction.
So we'll cover that in another episode, in another conversation that we share. But for now, I'm not gonna ask you what your life's purpose is and, and to find your life's purpose by tomorrow.
A Simple Challenge for Today
David Elikwu: I'm just gonna give you a much simpler challenge. I'm gonna ask you. To choose one thing for today, it could be making dinner. It could be reading a book to your child. It could be a single task in the course of your work day. [00:15:00] But pick one thing and for that one moment when you are engaging in that activity, remember age quos agis, go all in.
Do the thing that you're doing, carve away everything else like Michelangelo did the sculpture. Burn yourself completely. Don't try to be productive. Don't try to be perfect. Just feel what it's like to do a thing without having your mind addled and jumping about between the background tasks and the notifications and the pings and the pongs.
Just do the thing that you're. And finally turn off that alarm. Don't hit snooze. Turn it off. Rise awake, you sleeper, and go about the thing that you know you ought to do. So.
Conclusion and Upcoming Events
David Elikwu: I am David Elikwu, and this is The Knowledge. As I mentioned, I've got an awesome book called Sovereign, which comes out on September the 24th, 2025.
You can get it@becomesovereign.com. Actually, uh, [00:16:00] in a week or so, if you're listening to this somewhat live, we will be having, and over the coming weeks, we're having a series of pre-order parties. We're having a series of live events in London. Uh, the first will be in Liverpool Street, and the, and the.
Following ones, we may change the locations, but I'm really excited to meet a lot of you. So feel free to, if you are interested in coming, first of all, leave a comment or something like that, but go to the knowledge.io and uh, subscribe to my newsletter because I'm gonna be sending out the details shortly.
So I'd be very excited to see many of you there. I do sincerely hope that you come and join us, and thank you. Have a wonderful week.
