Q: I'm only half way through your book but have a question I hope you can help with. I have no energy, I’m tired all the time, and I have no attention span. Why can't I be happy?

The real question behind your question is: “Why isn’t the dream working anymore?”

On the surface, you’re asking about fatigue, lack of focus, and unhappiness, the classic language of someone trying to get back to normal. But it could be that what’s actually happening is that “normal” is collapsing. The old self animated by meaning, striving, and identity is running out of fuel. What you’re calling “tired” may not be a medical condition, but the energy drain of maintaining an illusion that’s no longer believable.

The inability to focus isn’t a defect of the individual; it’s the predictable consequence of a species terrified of stillness. Attention is repelled by the present because the present has no narrative, and the false self is narrative.

So when you say “I can’t focus,” what you really mean is “I can’t stop running from myself.”

The dream needs your attention the way a parasite needs blood. Our entire cultural machinery, advertising, entertainment, social media, self-improvement, even most spirituality, exists to keep attention scattered outward, away from the single place truth can be found: within.

Human Adulthood requires the reclaiming of attention, not through discipline or detox, but through seeing. You don’t train focus, you see through distraction. It only exists to keep the false self alive. Your attention isn’t wandering, it flees the truth. Stop chasing it; start asking what it’s afraid to see.

You’re not broken or lazy; you’re disillusioned. Perhaps the machinery that used to generate purpose no longer functions because you’ve started to see through it. The false self is powered by stories about who you are, what matters, what success or happiness mean. When those stories lose credibility, the system flickers. What you’re experiencing may not be a failure, but the early phase of dismantling.

What you’re describing is common in Phase One: Discontent. In this stage, life begins to feel hollow, repetitive, or meaningless despite outward stability. The self is still performing but can no longer believe its own script. The exhaustion you describe is what happens when the energy that once sustained the dream is being redirected, not yet toward truth, but away from illusion.

You’re asking, “Why can’t I be happy?” But the hidden assumption there is that happiness is the goal, that it’s something you can return to if you just fix the problem. 

The real question is: “Who is this ‘I’ that’s trying to be happy?”

The forward-moving inquiry isn’t how to feel better, but what’s actually dying when the capacity for happiness disappears.

Sit with that. The work isn’t to find happiness, it’s to see through the one who believes happiness is missing.