By 
Picture this: It’s 3 AM in a warehouse in Melbourne, and I’m shifting TVs.
My back aches, my hands are covered in cardboard dust, and all I can think is: “What the hell happened to my life?”
Just two years earlier, I’d graduated with a psychology degree from Deakin University; I had the education, the potential, and the whole “bright future” thing everyone talked about.
Yet here I was, doing mind-numbing manual labor, feeling like every TV I moved was another reminder of how far I’d fallen from where I thought I’d be.
The worst part? This wasn’t some temporary gig while I figured things out.
This was my life, day after day, month after month.
During breaks, while my coworkers scrolled through social media, I’d sit in the corner reading about Buddhism and mindfulness on my phone, desperately searching for something, anything, that would make sense of this mess I’d found myself in.
Looking back now, that warehouse job was exactly where I needed to be because it forced me to confront the most important question of my life.
The question that changed everything
One particularly brutal shift, after shifting what felt like the thousandth TV of the week, I found myself sitting outside during lunch break, staring at the concrete wall across from me.
My phone battery had died, leaving me alone with my thoughts, and that’s when it hit me.
A simple question that cut through all the noise, all the expectations, all the shoulds and supposed-tos: “Who am I when nobody’s watching?”
Not who my parents wanted me to be, who society expected me to be, nor the version of success I’d absorbed from movies and motivational posters.
But who was I, really, when all the external pressures fell away?
The answer was uncomfortable: I had no idea.
I’d spent so many years trying to be the man I thought I was supposed to be that I’d never stopped to ask if that was the man I wanted to be.
My entire life had been built on other people’s blueprints.
Living someone else’s dream
Here’s what nobody tells you about doing everything “right”: It can still feel completely wrong.
I’d checked all the boxes, got the degree, worked the entry-level jobs, and networked at the right events, but success—as I’d been taught to define it—felt like wearing a suit that was three sizes too small.
Sure, I could squeeze into it, but I couldn’t breathe.
The psychology degree? That was partly my parents’ idea of a “stable career path.”
The corporate job interviews I’d bombed? Those were attempts to fit into a world that valued everything I wasn’t.
Ironically, the warehouse job that represented my lowest point professionally was becoming the catalyst for my highest point personally.
When you strip away all pretense, when you’re doing work that requires zero of your education or talents, you’re left with just yourself.
No hiding behind credentials and no impressing anyone with your potential; just you, your thoughts, and eight hours to figure out what you actually want from life.
The gap between education and fulfillment
During those warehouse months, I devoured everything I could about Eastern philosophy and mindfulness because something in those teachings resonated with a part of me I’d been ignoring for years.
Buddhism taught me about impermanence, about letting go of attachments to outcomes, while mindfulness showed me how to sit with discomfort without immediately trying to escape it.
These two became my lifelines.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. There I was, with a psychology degree gathering dust, learning more about the human condition from ancient texts and meditation apps than I’d ever learned in a classroom.
This gap between education and fulfillment is something we rarely talk about.
We assume that knowledge automatically leads to wisdom and that credentials lead to contentment, but fulfillment comes from who you become.
Building from the ground up
Once I started asking myself who I wanted to be rather than who I should be, everything shifted.
I realized I wanted to write real, raw, and helpful content that could reach people where they were. People like me, struggling to make sense of a world that seemed designed to make us feel inadequate.
That realization led to founding Hack Spirit in 2016. It combined a lot I’d learned from degree, those long nights reading Buddhist texts, and the humbling experience of starting over at rock bottom.
The site became my way of bridging that gap between ancient wisdom and modern struggles. It was also a bridge between the gaps of the philosophical and the practical, and who we think we should be and who we actually are.
Writing my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, was another step in that journey.
It was about sharing what I’d learned when I stopped trying to be someone else’s version of successful.
The courage to disappoint
Here’s what I wish someone had told me in my twenties: Becoming who you want to be often means disappointing who you’re supposed to be.
That’s scary. It means potentially letting down parents, friends, or that idealized version of yourself you’ve been carrying around. It means admitting that the path you’ve been on might be the wrong one.
However, here’s the thing about disappointment: It’s temporary, because living as someone you’re not is a life sentence.
When I finally had the courage to pursue writing and building Hack Spirit full-time, not everyone understood.
Some people thought I was wasting my education, while others couldn’t see how writing about mindfulness and self-development was a “real job.”
But, for the first time in my life, I didn’t need their approval because I’d found something more valuable: Alignment between who I was and what I did.
Final words
That warehouse job ended years ago, but I still think about it often with gratitude. It was exactly the crucible I needed to burn away everything that wasn’t truly me.
If you’re feeling lost in a job or life that means nothing to you, know that you’re not broken, failing, nor asking yourself the wrong questions.
Instead of “How can I be more successful?” try “What does success mean to me?”
Rather than “What should I do with my life?” ask “Who do I want to become?”
Most importantly, ask yourself: “Who am I when nobody’s watching?”
The answer might surprise you, scare you, or require you to rebuild everything from scratch, but I promise you that the person you want to be is worth so much more than the person you think you’re supposed to be.
It’s up to you whether you have the courage to find out.