Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

You are empty. I mean this literally. Our bodies are like little galaxies. Galaxies have billions of massive stars in them and yet the reality is that the space between those stars is so gigantic that a galaxy is mostly empty. That’s exactly like you. You are made up of atoms. Every piece of you. And yet the actual physical matter in an atom (protons, neutrons, electrons) take up only one-fiftieth of one percent of the space in that atom. The rest is empty. So you are empty. There’s nothing really there. The real you—the real fire—is inside this emptiness. We spend our lives afraid of the emptiness. We want to fill it with love, with money, with pleasures, with anything that could put off the ultimate. But all of those things are never enough. They all decay. Only the emptiness does not decay. The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.