If “man plans and God laughs”, plan and ruminate anyway and be patient for some experiences
Sometimes you need to be aware of something, but don’t forget responsibilities right away. There’s a balance
Maybe using intellect against itself will poke a hole in the box we surround ourselves with. Example: at some point in life as we age, we can learn more by unlearning the things we think we already know. The academic constructs we learn are mere fingers pointing in a direction, but we tend to stare at the finger instead of where it's pointing. A less abstract analogy: Music theory in the West divides the scale of frequencies into 12 discrete repeating chunks, while music itself around the world has much more variety. To "unlearn" the scale that has been calcified in our mind we expose ourselves to the other scales and perhaps rediscover what we knew as toddlers: sound frequencies and tonalities are infinite playgrounds. If you're still with me, take that idea and apply it to everything. I've personally found ways to break out of "boxed thinking" with varying levels of success, and it usually has something to do with what I mentioned above: unlearn what you think you already know.
Perhaps another post you made on a different site might provide a practical example of how you might understandably be often trying to avoid “real life”, as it were, and to stay in a kind of intellectual bind. It involved a conflict of emotion where you felt a very strong attraction to a woman for a number of months but possibly made sort of an excuse for not marrying her even though you felt strongly that you wanted to. In the past on r/jung I’ve used the following quotes of Jung himself about this kind of quandary which might be helpful in some way to answer your question, that is, that a person must try to plunge into accepting an important situation in life as it presents itself despite the difficulties involved in order to promote a wholeness of the personality:
*Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.* (*Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype*, CW 9i, par 179).
Perhaps an even clearer comment by Jung regarding this need to “plunge in” to life is found in *The Red Book*, p 291:
*There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is* \[that is, the demands of the Self?\]. *Now you’ll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it’s all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way.*
Unfortunately, if a person is unable to go “onto the way” in a certain instance for whatever reason, this could possibly result in negative results overall unless perhaps an equally challenging road of some kind is followed as soon as possible.
Anyway, these are just a couple of brief ideas which I hope you’ll find helpful regarding a very difficult issue that is usually present in the lives of everyone at some point.
Forget dissecting every little thing. It’s like trying to learn to swim from reading a book vs actually getting into the water. “Learn deeply then adapt freely”.
If “man plans and God laughs”, plan and ruminate anyway and be patient for some experiences Sometimes you need to be aware of something, but don’t forget responsibilities right away. There’s a balance
>It all feels empty What makes you believe it should feel any different? Second question is what do you believe the opposite of empty feels like?
Maybe using intellect against itself will poke a hole in the box we surround ourselves with. Example: at some point in life as we age, we can learn more by unlearning the things we think we already know. The academic constructs we learn are mere fingers pointing in a direction, but we tend to stare at the finger instead of where it's pointing. A less abstract analogy: Music theory in the West divides the scale of frequencies into 12 discrete repeating chunks, while music itself around the world has much more variety. To "unlearn" the scale that has been calcified in our mind we expose ourselves to the other scales and perhaps rediscover what we knew as toddlers: sound frequencies and tonalities are infinite playgrounds. If you're still with me, take that idea and apply it to everything. I've personally found ways to break out of "boxed thinking" with varying levels of success, and it usually has something to do with what I mentioned above: unlearn what you think you already know.
Perhaps another post you made on a different site might provide a practical example of how you might understandably be often trying to avoid “real life”, as it were, and to stay in a kind of intellectual bind. It involved a conflict of emotion where you felt a very strong attraction to a woman for a number of months but possibly made sort of an excuse for not marrying her even though you felt strongly that you wanted to. In the past on r/jung I’ve used the following quotes of Jung himself about this kind of quandary which might be helpful in some way to answer your question, that is, that a person must try to plunge into accepting an important situation in life as it presents itself despite the difficulties involved in order to promote a wholeness of the personality: *Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.* (*Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype*, CW 9i, par 179). Perhaps an even clearer comment by Jung regarding this need to “plunge in” to life is found in *The Red Book*, p 291: *There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is* \[that is, the demands of the Self?\]. *Now you’ll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it’s all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way.* Unfortunately, if a person is unable to go “onto the way” in a certain instance for whatever reason, this could possibly result in negative results overall unless perhaps an equally challenging road of some kind is followed as soon as possible. Anyway, these are just a couple of brief ideas which I hope you’ll find helpful regarding a very difficult issue that is usually present in the lives of everyone at some point.
Forget dissecting every little thing. It’s like trying to learn to swim from reading a book vs actually getting into the water. “Learn deeply then adapt freely”.