You're not depressed, you just don't have a quest

how to take back control of your life

Most people aren't depressed. They're questless.

And while I'd love to debate about chemical imbalances all day and waste our time, that's not the type of depression I'm worried about discussing here. This letter is for those who can't seem to escape the sense of disorder that has slowly taken over their mind.

If you feel like you've been stuck living the same life that you've grown to hate, let's break down the psychology of what's going on here so you know exactly what you need to do to turn your life around.

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The human mind is a story engine.

Stories are how we make sense of the world, and if you get stuck in your own story due to cowardice or sloth, nothing makes sense anymore, and it's difficult to see a way out when your mind is narrowed in on a chaotic mess of thoughts.

When a story becomes interactive, it becomes a game.

Your psychology runs on feedback loops. This is why you can log 8 hours of World of Warcraft without blinking an eye but can't stand even 30 minutes at the job you hate.

Most people think they're depressed because if you don't choose a game, you will be assigned one, and the games that society wants you to play get boring extremely fast. You would stop playing a game if you just repeated the same quest for 10 years straight, but since that's the only life you were taught, and you haven't made constant self-education and experimentation values of yours, you can't even see the infinite number of quests lying around you that would bring a sense of enjoyment back to your life.

The solution to feeling bored, lost, or what most people think is depressed is to create your own game and accept one quest after another until you don't even recognize yourself.

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You don't want freedom from rules.

You want the freedom to create your own rules.

The only reason you think you want freedom is because you don't want to conform to the limitations someone else placed on you, but if you got that freedom, your mind wouldn't be able to process anything meaningful, and your life would get significantly worse.

True freedom lies in creating your own game:

• Set clear goals → Define what winning looks like to you.

• Create feedback loops → Daily quests, weekly missions, monthly boss fights.

• Impose your own rules → What can't you do that adds challenge to the game?

• Become aware of the stakes → What happens if you don't win?

• Develop knowledge and skill → Every milestone requires learning and practice.

What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

When Nietzsche said this, he didn't mean power over others, but rather the feeling of increasing competence and the ability to overcome challenges.

Your life loses spark because you have vague goals, no feedback, no urgency, no narrative, and no development. You don't have a frame that prevents your mind from going insane. You don't have a self-imposed mental model that distractions can't penetrate. You don't live in your own little world.

For fitness, winning looks like having a physique with visible muscle mass and 10% bodyfat. I have daily quests of hitting 2500 calories and spending 45 minutes at the gym. I have rules of eating 90% whole foods and 200g of protein while maintaining good form with my lifts. My weekly missions are losing 2 pounds. My monthly boss fights are hitting a new record on my lifts. The stakes are that I end up obese and low confidence. To do all of this, I must supplement with education.

For business, I have revenue goals, deep work sessions, weekly projects, bi-monthly launches, values that push me to build something meaningful, the stakes of becoming broke, and an increasing level of knowledge I must acquire. When those frame my focus, it becomes very difficult to worry about nonsense.

Most people don't find this deeply enjoyable because they see it as an obligation rather than a choice to avoid the dire consequences of doing nothing with their lives. They don't approach every situation as a game.

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The mind craves order.

A hierarchy of goals.

A quest to make sense of and filter chaos.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, found that boredom and anxiety stem from psychic entropy. If you don't know what entropy is, don't worry about it too much. Lots of science. What you need to know is that entropy basically means things naturally fall apart or become messy over time.

Think of how your room gets cluttered if you don't clean it, or how a sandcastle crumbles at the beach. Csikszentmihalyi used this idea to explain what happens in our minds - when our thoughts and attention aren't focused on something meaningful, our mental state becomes scattered and chaotic, leading to boredom or anxiety. Just as we need to put effort into keeping our room organized, we must also direct our mental energy toward engaging activities to prevent our inner world from becoming disordered.

It's okay to feel bored or anxious, obviously. But if you don't view those as signals to make a small pivot in your life (or start searching for a new quest), they slowly amplify until you fall into a lower state of consciousness that you label as depression. Your room becomes so dirty that you don't even know where to start cleaning.

You're bored because you haven't exposed yourself to potential futures that demand an increase in skill and knowledge.

You're anxious because you've projected too far into the future and don't have the required skill or knowledge.

The sweet spot that brings enjoyment back into your life occurs where the challenge level of a goal meets your level of skill and knowledge.

The secret to a good life is never-ending progress through your own story.

The secret to a good life lies in the pursuit of your potential.

That's where the flow of information is maximized.

You don't leap into the unknown. You take a few steps. You metabolize the experience without going insane. Then, when you level up and that stage normalizes, you accept the next quest.

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You become someone in a game.

You start off as a level one.

No skills. No traits. No profession.

You go through the tutorial phase, grind out experience, and create the character you would enjoy playing.

Increasing your level in the game allows you to take on more interesting challenges, making life itself more interesting.

Looking at the stages of ego development, a psychological theory from Susanne Cooke Greuter, there are 9 documented stages. Each level represents a more sophisticated way of making sense of the world.

The questless feel empty because they're stuck as the same person. They haven't developed who they are, which limits the range of what they can find meaningful or challenging.

When you treat life as a game, you're not just achieving external shallow goals. You're becoming someone who can perceive and engage with more complex patterns, relationships, and challenges. A construct-aware self can handle nuanced challenges that would paralyze someone at the conformist stage.

At each stage of development, or at each level in the game, you expand what you're capable of being.

You, your self-concept, literally are more.

More perspectives, more skills, more ways to engage with reality.

That's how you bring a sense of zest back into your life.

– Dan

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