You Can’t Solve Your Problems…Arousal Can

Here’s the thing no one really wants to say out loud because it sounds stupid at first, and also too simple, and also way too humiliating if it turns out to be true: You can’t solve your problems. It’s not because you’re dumb or lazy or uncommitted to your vision board or haven’t read enough books about habits. It’s because the version of you that’s trying to solve them is the same one that built them. You’re basically asking the arsonist to do the fire inspection. The strategist can’t fix the mess because the strategist is the mess.

But instead of admitting this, we do what humans do best: we get busy. We “work on ourselves.” We polish. We investigate. We apologize better. We write lists, light candles, ask friends to hold us accountable. We become really good people. The uncomfortable part is that goodness, that anxious ethical scaffolding, is often just an upgraded form of self-deception. It’s like this Agent Orange of moral performance—nearly indistinguishable from virtue, and yet it scorches the very terrain we’re trying to save.

There is a membrane. An invisible threshold. On one side: everything you think you are. Your story, your achievements, your grievances, the little scoreboard in your head. On the other side: arousal. Arousal like current, like voltage, like every cell in your body remembering it was built to animate with life. That is where your genius lives.

The problem is, thought can’t cross the membrane. Guilt can’t cross it. Self-improvement can’t. You ask one single question: How do I get into arousal? And then you stay there, or try to. And then you try again.

All that other stuff—the obsessing, the fixing, the eternal trying—it feels productive because it is movement, and movement feels like momentum. But it’s like being on a hamster wheel with a FitBit. You’re logging effort, sure, but you’re not actually going anywhere. You’re just reifying the self, this looping program of not-enoughness dressed up in its best spiritual drag. 

This arousal is the only thing strong enough to rewire you. You don’t change you. Arousal does. It gets in and moves furniture around without asking. It doesn’t fix your personality; it vaporizes it. It dissolves the barricades. It floods the system with something bright and warm and wild. You become coherent, which is a terrifying concept if you’ve built your whole identity on managing contradictions. You’re no longer a thousand micro-decisions duct-taped together. You’re one thing, humming.

Eventually, if you’re lucky, the current of arousal carries you across. You don’t even know it happened until you’re on the other side, and something quiet inside says, “This. Only this.”