The Three Paths

Most people want to make more money.

Others want to raise decent kids, win at pickleball, or look great in tight pants.

That’s Path One: the visible path. External achievement. The to-do list. It’s the part of life we point at and post about: careers, families, houses, six-packs, followers, revenue. You know, the standard buffet of status signals. And let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with any of it. Path One is full of compelling drama. Fortunes are made, bankruptcies are learned from, and fun is had.

There are lots of stories here to help you achieve your goals.

But that’s not the only path in compelling life stories. Usually after a little time on the planet, you start to realize that the money doesn’t do what it promised. The kids have their own lives. Looking good leads to more anxiety, not less. So you do what many people do at that juncture: you switch to Path Two.

Path Two is the Inner Journey. The Hero’s Arc. The story of becoming a better version of yourself. It’s less public, but just as addictive. Meditation apps. Trauma therapy. Coaching. Supplements. Sleep pods. Journals with prompts. Ice baths. Shadow work. You’re not just trying to win now — you’re trying to grow. Heal. Self-actualize.

Again, nothing wrong here. I’ve walked both these paths. Built businesses. Raised kids. I’ve done Ayahuasca in the jungle, received spiritual guidance on Zoom, and tried hot yoga (once). I’ve tracked habits, hacked mornings, and made spreadsheets of my spiritual progress. It’s fun. It’s noble. It gave me something to do the past decade.

There are lots of these stories as well, to help you become a better version of you.

For many people, in fact nearly all people, these two paths are the only ones they’ll ever travel. Traveling these paths is both exhilarating and exhausting. The problem is that the paths don’t seem to lead anywhere. Always another goal to achieve, something else in my psyche to fix. I imagine I could have gone on like this the rest of my life, gaining and losing fortunes, gaining and losing personal clarity. Writing about all of it when I wasn’t too tired from the hamster wheel.

But one day I stumbled across a Third Path. I’ve always known about it, but thought it was out of reach. The path of enlightenment, the path of learning the Truth. It always seemed far away, at the very end of Path Two, perhaps. I thought maybe if I was lucky I might get there someday, but I wasn’t getting any closer.

It turns out I wasn’t getting closer because it’s not part of the path of self-improvement. You can’t get closer to the Truth by fixing and improving and becoming.

And so it is for a very small minority of the population. Spontaneously or otherwise, you stumble onto this Third Path. It happens when you begin to suspect you’re running laps in a maze where the cheese was removed several turns ago. You fix one thing, another breaks. You find peace, then lose it. It all starts to feel like a game rigged to keep you “working on yourself” until death.

Path Three is not about getting better. It’s about seeing more clearly. In fact it’s not a path at all, think of it as a clearing in the middle of the forest where you can stop and catch your breath, noticing for the first time how lovely the forest is and how nice it feels to just sit still for a bit before getting back to the other paths.

Path Three doesn’t upgrade you. It exposes the illusion of there being a “you” to upgrade.

It’s not about achieving anything at all. It’s about recognizing what’s already here, already true, already whole.

The problem is, Path Three has terrible PR.

Nobody gets rich on Path Three. There are no before-and-after photos. You don’t get abs. You don’t get closure. You don’t become a legend in your niche.

You don’t become anyone, really.

You notice, instead, that you were never the person you thought you were to begin with. That your life story was a story. That your inner voice was an improv narrator trying to explain the movie while it played.

You don’t transcend the human experience. You just stop taking it personally.

So why do it?

Because once you get even a glimpse of this third path, everything else gets lighter. The drama of Path One, the striving of Path Two — they keep their charm, but lose their weight. You can still play the game, but you stop looking at the scoreboard. You still feel pain, but suffering becomes optional.

And from that place, oddly, both Path One and Two start to work better.

You become a better parent because you’re not trying so hard to be one.

You lead more effectively because you’re no longer obsessed with control.

Path Three doesn’t replace the others. It recontextualizes them.

You can still build the business, raise the kids, meditate, lift, journal, optimize. But you do it from a place of quiet absurdity. You know it’s a game. You’re playing it anyway. The joy is in the performance, not the prize.

The final set of stories here is about that elusive Third Path. Not how to achieve success. Not how to become a better version of yourself. It’s the path of noticing.

It leads nowhere.

It leads everywhere.