The Age of Overstimulation
Nowadays, it’s easy to get lost in what people want from you, what you see around you, and in the sheer amount of information and stimulation firing at you like an automatic machine gun from every corner of technology.
We live in an age where information, content, and distraction are cheap and abundant. It’s made us insensitive. We’ve become reactive and also blaming the external. And frankly, it’s hard not to get pulled under and lose a sense of who you really are. To remain connected to your truth — your real truth — feels nearly impossible in the world we live in right now.
What Does It Mean to Live Authentically?
To live authentically today means to resist that pull — the seduction of overstimulation, comparison, and numbing. It means becoming self-aware of what you allow in, and what you put out.
This isn’t easy. In a world where we’re expected to always be available, updated, curated, and performing, the ability to be present and honest in yourself becomes an act of rebellion. It takes strength to pause and feel what’s actually happening inside you — rather than reacting to everything happening outside.
What Painting Taught Me About Truth
Through years of painting, I’ve learned that truth doesn’t come from ideas alone — it comes from doing. In my process, I’ve had to connect with my work so fully that I almost disappear into it. I become the painting, and it becomes me. It’s raw, exposing, and often uncomfortable — but that’s where the truth lives.
And from this, I’ve come to understand something important:
To live a true life, you must accept all parts of yourself — the best, the good, the normal, the bad, and yes, even the evil and that one is the most difficult.
Only by integrating all aspects of who you are can you hope to live authentically. Not just the joyful parts, not just the success, but the darker layers too — the ones we’re taught to hide.
We Avoid What Needs Us Most
It’s easy to accept the happy emotions, the beautiful moments, the light.
But what about fear, shame, anger, grief?
Most of us spend our lives avoiding those. We bury them under work, distractions, entertainment, or endless striving. But avoidance doesn’t erase them — it only makes them more powerful, it turns them into a ticking nuclear bomb.
We’re haunted by what we don’t accept.
Real redemption and self-integration only happen when we’re willing to look into those dark corners and say: You too belong here and I welcome you. Only then do we begin to free ourselves from the inside out.
The Hell We Must Face
I recently watched As Above, So Below, a horror film with real philosophical depth. Beneath the surface fear lies a message about self-confrontation and healing. The characters descend into a kind of modern Dante’s hell, where demons feed on their deepest fears. Only by facing and accepting those fears are they able to escape.
This mirrors our own inner experience.
To live authentically, we must first face our personal hell — and then find hope and strength inside it.
Change Begins Within
All of this leads to a single, ancient truth:
You cannot transform your world if you haven’t transformed yourself.
But self-transformation doesn’t come from thinking or consuming — it comes from doing. From engaging in something that pushes you into your raw edges. From acts of deep presence. From building, failing, creating, and starting again.
Wisdom comes from action. And authenticity comes from wholeness.
A Final Reflection
So maybe the real challenge of living truthfully in the 21st century is not in escaping the noise —but in facing what the silence reveals when we finally turn it off.