YOU DESERVE A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

On Presence, Flow, and the Courage to Be Yourself - by Gary Null, PhD

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

What Do We Mean by Beauty?

All of us want a beautiful life. We want lovely objects around us and wonderful thoughts, and we want to be in beautiful places. We are going to explore what we can do to actualize these desires.

When I say beauty, I mean beauty on a spiritual level, on an emotional level, and even on a physical level. How often has your image in the mirror upset you because you did not like what you saw? How did you get that way? How did you begin to fall apart physically? We think: Okay, I am older. Should I not look older? Up to a point, yes. But if we believe we should, our belief will create our reality. Much of what you believe you are will manifest. Sometimes it happens subtly; you are not even aware of what you are thinking.

The philosopher William James argued that the greatest discovery of his generation was that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. That discovery has been confirmed by a century of subsequent research in psychology, neuroscience, and epigenetics. The inner attitude is not a side effect of life. It is the blueprint. And the first step toward a beautiful life is the recognition that you are, right now, building the life you are going to inhabit — thought by thought, choice by choice, moment by moment.

One of our problems is that we do not know where to begin the journey. In reality, everyone can start, at any time and any place. Whether you are rich or poor, educated or not, you can still start your journey to create a beautiful life. Let us see what steps you can take to get there.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
— The Buddha

Stay Completely Present

The very first step in any journey is to stay absolutely and completely present. What if you could visualize your body a year from now just by staying present and looking at yourself? Ask yourself: How could I have that body a year from now? By being present and resting in your quiet, feeling mind, you can detach from everything, seeing everyone and everything for what they are. Your awareness allows you to understand what you are doing, and what the consequences would be. Then you can say: All right. Now that I see this, I can make a more informed and reasonable choice.

No one likes to look back and think: Did I make all those stupid things happen? Yes. Could they have been different? Yes. Why were they not different? Because you were stuffing too much into every moment to pay attention to what the moment could have really meant. We tend to think that as long as we are doing our work well, being responsible and on time, those things are a good use of our time. But are they really? What if you used your time to honor your life?

This is harder now than it has ever been, because the architecture of modern life is specifically designed to prevent presence. Your phone vibrates every few minutes with a notification engineered by behavioral psychologists to trigger a dopamine response. Your news feed is algorithmically curated to provoke anxiety and outrage, because anxiety and outrage keep you scrolling. Your inbox fills overnight with messages that feel urgent but are not. The average American checks their phone ninety-six times a day — once every ten minutes of waking life. That is not presence. That is surveillance of your own distraction.

And now we have added artificial intelligence to the equation. AI companions that simulate conversation, simulate empathy, simulate relationship — without requiring the one thing that genuine presence demands: vulnerability. You can talk to an AI chatbot for an hour and feel heard without ever having been seen. You can process your feelings through a language model without ever risking the discomfort of being truly known by another person. The Surgeon General of the United States has declared loneliness a public health epidemic, with health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. And our response, as a culture, has been to build machines that imitate connection rather than doing the difficult, irreplaceable work of creating it.

To Honor Your Life, You Have to Be Aware That You Have a Life

We know we have responsibilities. We know we have relationships. We know we have jobs. But do we know we have a life? Some people do not know that, because they do not slow down long enough, they do not go to that neutral place that would allow them to realize the consequences of not having a life. What they feel and what they are emoting are the consequences of the choices they have made, as if someone is sticking them with a pin every other minute. We tend to adjust to this state of affairs, and before we know it, our whole life involves limiting the pain, the hassles, and the stresses of each day instead of paying attention to the uniqueness of each day. You can make different choices. You do not have to be stuck, and you do not have to have the pain. You do not have to be caught up in your own busyness.

You can slow yourself down. You can ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Why am I saying that? Why am I eating that? Why am I having the same phone conversation for the hundredth time? Why am I spilling out my guts when it changes nothing? You can confess your life and your problems one thousand times over to everybody who wants to listen, and they will cry with you; you can put yourself on the journey of finding someone who will suffer with you and who will bear witness to your suffering; but what really changes? Little to nothing. How many people want to share pleasure compared to those who want to share suffering? Is that not amazing? There are no limits to what you can tell a person when it comes to your suffering, but what you can say about your pleasure is so very circumscribed. We have got it all wrong. Make a point to share your positive energy and pleasure, and see what happens.

The psychologist Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, spent decades studying precisely this asymmetry. His research confirmed what most of us sense intuitively: human beings are wired with a negativity bias. We process negative experiences more deeply, remember them more vividly, and share them more readily than positive ones. Evolution built us this way — the ancestors who were hypervigilant about threats survived longer than the ones who were relaxed. But what served us on the savanna is destroying us in the modern world. We are drowning in negativity not because the world is worse than it has ever been, but because our attention systems are locked onto threat, and the entire media and social media ecosystem is designed to exploit that lock.

Seligman’s insight was that positivity is not naive. It is a discipline. It requires as much effort and intention as any other skill. And when practiced — when you deliberately choose to notice what is good, to share what is beautiful, to express what brings you joy — the neurological effect is measurable. The brain changes. The body changes. The relationships change. It is not magic. It is biology responding to a different set of inputs.

Our Illusions of Identity

If we work at a certain job and earn a certain amount of money, we can buy a certain type of clothing, usually expensive. But do your clothes define you as a better person? No, that is an illusion. We can live in a fancy apartment; we can eat in fancy restaurants — not necessarily better but perceived as better because they are more expensive and more exclusive. We might even get wealthy enough to be invited to exclusive places by people considered to be elite. But the idea that they are better is an illusion too.

I counsel all types of people. I counsel some of the wealthiest and most famous people, and also some of the poorest people in New York. And I want to tell you something I have noticed. People have a very specific idea of their value. More often than not, their value is based on what they possess, on their reputation, or on what they have achieved. Everywhere you look we are trying to separate people by such illusions, and eventually we get a collective mindset by which people believe in a common illusion together.

We believe the rich are more valuable than the poor. We believe the educated are more valuable than the uneducated. We believe the person who goes to church is more valuable than the person who does not. We think a married person is more valuable than a single person. We think the person who is older is more valuable than the younger person, irrespective of who they are — unless they are too old, and then they are not valuable at all.

Social media has turbocharged this illusion of identity beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. We now curate digital versions of ourselves that bear only a passing resemblance to who we actually are. We filter our photographs. We edit our captions. We present a highlight reel and call it a life. A study published in 2025 found that the average person spends more than forty minutes a day managing their online identity — selecting images, crafting posts, monitoring reactions. That is forty minutes a day spent constructing an illusion. Over a year, that is more than ten full days of waking life dedicated not to being yourself but to performing a version of yourself for an audience of people who are doing the same thing.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described exactly this mechanism decades before the internet existed. He called it bad faith — the condition of performing a self that is not your own, of identifying so completely with a social role that you lose contact with the freedom beneath it. The waiter who plays at being a waiter, the executive who plays at being an executive — these are people who have confused the costume with the person wearing it. Social media has made bad faith into a way of life. And the cost is not abstract. It is loneliness, anxiety, depression, and the quiet, persistent sense that something essential is missing.

It takes courage to step aside and say no to these illusions. Only you can decide what is real and what is illusory.

All of Our Beliefs Hold Conditioning

We are conditioned to accept the content of our beliefs. Let me give you an example. You are on the subway and someone smiles at you. The content of the conditioning around that smile is: Do not look at a stranger, especially on a subway. You are going to put yourself at risk. Look down. Look away. But if you discover something on your own instead of relying on your preconceived notions, then you might well change your mind. What if someone smiled at you and you smiled back?

To get rid of your conditioning you have to realize that the conditioning is there because it holds a lot of content that is constantly being reloaded with old messages over and over again. Every time you hear the same message, it reinforces what you have already been told. We will stay prisoners to the messages unless we can get to neutral, to that quiet place where we can examine the messages and ask ourselves which ones are biased, which ones are unfair, and which ones lack honesty and objectivity.

The conditioning used to come from a finite number of sources: your parents, your teachers, your church, your neighborhood. It was powerful, but it was limited. Today, the conditioning is infinite and continuous. Every time you open a browser, an algorithm is reinforcing your existing beliefs and feeding you content designed to keep you inside the worldview you already inhabit. Every time you ask an AI assistant a question, you receive an answer shaped by training data that reflects the biases of the culture that produced it. We are being conditioned now not only by people but by systems — by machines that learn our preferences and then mirror them back to us until we mistake the echo for the truth.

You have got to reach that place in your life where you can look at something and say: No. I do not believe it anymore. When you disconnect right then and there from those messages, you will begin to discover your freedom.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
— Aristotle

Discover the Flow of Your Life

How many times have we pulled our energy back when we might have allowed ourselves to flow forward? You can block your own energy, or you can let the energy flow. Everything in life is about constricting or flowing.

Let me give you an example. We look at our bank balance and see that we have overspent. The first thing we do is constrict. We start feeling insecure because there is a shortage. We cannot buy what we want. We lack abundance, which makes us apprehensive and makes us overreact. We fight with anyone else who may have participated in our overspending: Why did we buy that? We cannot afford it!

Or people say: I do not have a life anymore. All I am doing is working to pay my bills. I live in New York City. I cannot enjoy the city because I have to work so hard. By the time I get home at night I am tired. So I hang out with other people who also live in New York City who are frustrated by what they cannot afford, and we kvetch and complain together. Who put you here? Why do you not look for another place to live? Because instead of opening up, you close down.

The moment any stimulus from our environment says there is a shortage — of money or love or respect — we constrict. We get tight in the stomach. You know what I am talking about — something is not right, and you feel it in your gut. You get headaches and strains in your back and neck. We constrict because we cannot control people or the outcome of events. We get overwhelmed by our circumstances. On top of the circumstances, there are all those voices in our heads telling us how we should react and how we should respond.

Visualize that you are in a lifeboat. You are in a rough patch of water. You have a paddle, but you cannot control the boat because the current is too strong. You force yourself onward because you see an island, and you think that is what you need. But the closer you get to the island, the more apparent it becomes that it is not a lush, beautiful, bountiful paradise. It is a barren little outpost. But you are thinking: it is something. It is better than nothing. So you put all your energy into getting there. While the current is still pulling you away, you jump out of the boat and start swimming. Now your single purpose is to get to safety, and you do. You get up on the beach. You look around and think: I am glad I am out of the water. I am glad I am out of the current. But where are you? You look around and see a barren island.

How many times have you chosen a barren relationship, or job, or living environment, or friendship because it was better to choose something in the moment from fear and insecurity? At least you did not have to concern yourself with the current of life. But now the current of life continues to flow. It is going right by you. Every day the current is flowing, and you are a spectator. You are not in it. What would have happened if you had gone with the current? Where would the current have taken you?

How many times have we gone against the current of our own being? You know you should do A, but you are conditioned to do B. You know you should be open to the moment, but you are restricted and uptight. You go against your own internal chi, your own natural self. You are fighting it because the conditioned self is conditioned from a place of fear. And fear will always win if we give in to it. Then you are living on a barren little island.

For a moment in time, you are protected and secure. But whenever you need to feel secure, it means you are moving from insecurity, and when you do that, you will never fill the void. You will always feel empty and remain stuck. But what happens if you let yourself flow instead? Where will that current take you? What if it takes you to a place of beauty and harmony and serenity? What if it takes you to where all your own rhythms are flowing with the rhythm of life?

Then you are going to connect with like-minded people, because similar energies always connect. But we are afraid of who we are, and we are afraid of what would happen if we just flow. Take a look at your life and ask yourself how many times you have ended up on a barren little island.

When I go down to Florida I see gated communities everywhere. They are barren islands with golf, tennis, pools, and palm trees. They are closed off from the rest of the world. The inhabitants say: We do not want anything outside these gates. Stay out, world, and we will stay in. You do not have to live in a gated community to be isolated. You can be anywhere and isolate yourself. And when you do, there is nothing there for you except your fear. That is the only coat you can put on each day: fear. That is what happens when we make the wrong choice.

That is also what happens when we do not listen to the voice of the internal self, the real self. We listen to the conditioned voices: You cannot do that. You are not rich enough. You are not wise enough. You are too old. So you think: I guess that is right. I do not see anybody else doing it, and there are a lot of people like me. We will all scroll through our feeds together, comparing ourselves to strangers and calling it community.

What happens if you decide to strike out on your own? The others will ask: Where are you going? I am going on with my life. Hold on a second. What about us? I am leaving this island. You cannot leave this island. Sure I can. No, you cannot. You worked so hard to justify getting here and being here. You were cynical and negative. You made almost all your decisions from fear. We did too. We are your friends. I do not need friends like you. You do not know what is out there. You are right. I do not. But I do know what is here. And I would rather take the unknown and be in the flow of my life than the known and have no life. Never make the mistake of confusing your work and your lifestyle with a life.

When you are in the flow of your life, you can discover what happens when you expand love and when you give love. What happens when you do not limit the love you give? What happens when you do not fear giving love? Everyone and everything will feel that love. It is wonderful to feel the expansion of love. It keeps on vibrating, and when you connect with something as authentic as unconditional love, you know it. Every human being understands what love is because we were all born as pure love. No baby has ever been born evil or angry or jealous or full of rage. Not one.

When we go against our true selves because of conditioning, we cannot trust authentic love. We do not trust the truth and reality of what we could and should be and were meant to be. Instead, we trust the superficial, controlled, manipulated self. We can change that. You have to get off the island of your life to do it. You cannot have that love and be on that island. You cannot quiet your mind and be on that island. You cannot be in the most barren place in your life, no matter how secure it is, and expect a life of any meaning or joy.

Distractions Dissipate Energy

How much of your day is spent in distraction? When we put our energy out there, it distracts us from what is in here. We are always looking out and almost never looking in. We will overeat, or take tranquilizers, or keep ourselves constantly busy to fill the emptiness of our lives. We cannot stay with it. So at the end of the day, we do not feel anything except our busyness, and then our minds and all those conditioned voices will say: You are keeping busy. You have got a to-do list. See, every day you get through ten to fifteen items. You are doing the right thing.

Consider the scale of modern distraction. The average American spends over seven hours a day consuming digital media. Seven hours. That is nearly half of every waking day spent looking at screens — scrolling, watching, reacting, consuming content that was engineered by teams of behavioral scientists to capture and hold attention. TikTok’s infinite scroll was found by the European Union to constitute an addictive design. Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes content that triggers emotional arousal, not content that deepens understanding. YouTube’s autoplay function was designed specifically to prevent the moment of reflection in which a person might choose to stop watching. These are not neutral tools. They are extraction machines. They extract the one non-renewable resource you possess: your time. And they convert it into revenue for someone else.

Artificial intelligence has added a new layer to this. AI can now generate an infinite stream of personalized content — images, articles, videos, music — tailored precisely to your preferences, your history, your psychological profile. The era of generic distraction is over. We have entered the era of bespoke distraction, distraction custom-fitted to the exact contours of your avoidance. And the more sophisticated the technology becomes, the harder it will be to recognize that you are not engaging with reality. You are engaging with a mirror.

But what happens if you drop all these balls to just be present for a moment? Look carefully at your life, because only you can decide what your distractions are. Write them all down. Then add up how much time you give to each one. How do these distractions affect you emotionally, intellectually, creatively, physically, and spiritually? Do they enhance you or do they deplete you? And to what degree? How does the depletion manifest? You have the right to stop distracting yourself and regain your energy. When you are focused on the authentic, you are energized. When you are focused on distractions, you are drained.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, three and a half centuries ago, that all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He was writing in the age of horse-drawn carriages. Imagine what he would say now, in the age of smartphones and AI companions and algorithmic feeds and notifications engineered to make silence feel unbearable. His insight has not become less true. It has become more urgent than he could have possibly imagined.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
— Blaise Pascal

We Can Stop Clinging to Everything and Everybody

All this clinging. All this need for possession. All this need to have someone and something that is yours and unique — it is an illusion. In this world the only thing that you have that is unique to you is yourself. Everything else is just a passage. So enjoy the passages. Enjoy the people. Enjoy the events. But be present for your life in the moment you are in, so you can start making the right choices. Choose the lessons you want to learn.

You have to believe enough in yourself to stop clinging to fear and insecurity, to that sense of I am going to be without, I will not have enough, as if there is a shortage. These are all self-imposed shortages. There is no shortage of love. There is no shortage of experiences. There is no shortage of wonderful people. There is no shortage of beautiful places. There is no shortage of creativity. But you have to believe in yourself. If you want your mind to be creative, you have to challenge your mind. If you want your body to be healthy, you have to feed your body. If you want your soul to be expressive, you have to give unconditional love to the world. You cannot do it with fear, because fear is going to push you back in the closet, slam the door, and tell you to wait five more years.

Why should we wait one moment? We are alive this second, and we should honor this second. I do not want to wait until all the pieces are together, until all the questions are answered and all my fears have abated, until all my uncertainties have been calmed and all my illusions dispelled. None of us need that in order to declare ourselves open for life.

The poet Mary Oliver, who spent her life paying attention to the ordinary world with the precision of a scientist and the tenderness of a saint, asked the only question that ultimately matters: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Not your one safe and managed life. Not your one carefully curated and algorithmically optimized life. Your one wild and precious life. The wildness is the point. The preciousness is the reason. And the planning — the real planning, not the to-do list but the soul’s intention — begins the moment you stop clinging and start choosing.

Release Your Energy into Positive Change

I meet people all the time who say: I am too old to change. I am too tired to change. In every human being there is a dynamic life force. If you keep it controlled and repressed, it will not express itself. Open yourself up to express the dynamic energy that is uniquely your own. It has your signature written all over it. When you connect with that exuberance and start to open up, you are like a beautiful unfolding flower. Suddenly you think: This is a wonderful way to feel. I feel free. I am not making my decisions from fear or limitation or illusion or my conditioned self. I am in the moment. I want to be part of the flow of my life. I am present for the flow of my life. I do not have to wait until everything is right, until I have enough money or enough support. I am my own support. Money is not what supports me. Faith in myself supports me. Trusting in that eternal spirit is what I need.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, discovered in the most extreme circumstances imaginable that the last of human freedoms is the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. He watched men who had lost everything — their families, their homes, their health, their dignity — and he found that the ones who survived were the ones who found a reason to keep going, a meaning that could not be taken from them. If meaning can be found in Auschwitz, it can be found in your life. The question is not whether the world will give you permission. The question is whether you will give yourself permission.

It is not about your job or your friends or your possessions. It is about starting your journey with one step, but that step should not be a step forward. It should be a step away — away from distraction, from busyness, from judging, and from the emotions you use to protect yourself. Go to that empty space where your mind and spirit are present to bear witness. When you bear witness non-judgmentally, you see everything for what it is, and that is how you make clear choices. Surrender this, engage that, choose this, reject that — as long as you stay in that neutral and quiet space, everything will flow naturally and effortlessly.

Having and manifesting a beautiful life starts with appreciating how much beauty already exists in your life. All you have to do is surrender to it and open up. The beauty has been there all along — in the morning light, in the texture of bread, in the sound of a friend’s voice, in the quiet miracle of your own breathing. It does not require a screen to find it. It does not require an algorithm to curate it. It does not require a machine to simulate it. It only requires you. Present. Aware. Unafraid. And willing, at last, to let the current carry you home.

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
— Carl Jung