Latest / YINWorldWide / What Are Your Vices Hiding About You
Transcript
- Liv Yin: This is yin. And these are conversations about discipline, direction, and identity, and how they quietly shape who you become. Everybody has one. The thing you reach for when the day gets quiet, when the room gets still, when there's nothing left to do and no one left to perform for. You know the one. You don't have to say it out loud, and I'm not going to make you, but you felt it just now. You know exactly what it was before I finished the sentence. Maybe it's a drink, maybe it's the phone, maybe it's a person, maybe it's the thing you'd never tell anyone, the thing you've gotten good at hiding even from yourself. You see, we call them vices and we treat them like they're a problem. They are a problem, make no mistake, they cost you something, but they're not the root. Your vice is the smoke and something else is the fire. And you can spend your whole life fighting the smoke, quitting, relapsing, quitting again, white knuckling your way through a craving and calling it discipline. But if you never find the fire, the smoke always comes back, because nobody reaches for their vice when they're whole. You reach for it in the gap, in the quiet, and In the moments where you would sit with yourself and you decide you'd rather not, that's what a vice is. It's not the thing you do, it's the thing you do instead, instead of feeling it, instead of facing it, instead of sitting in the discomfort long enough to hear what it's trying to tell you. So here's what we're going to do today. I'm not going to help you quit anything. I'm going to do something harder. I'm going to help you find out. What you've been running from. And I'll go first. My vice has always been women. It's how I avoid the uncomfortable silence of being alone, of having to hear myself think. As long as there was someone there, I didn't have to be. I didn't have to sit with the questions, didn't have to answer to myself, didn't have to feel whatever was waiting for me in the quiet. There was always a conversation, always a chase. Always someone to fill the room so I never had to. And I called it everything except what it was. I called it connection. It wasn't connection. Connection would have been letting someone see me. This was the opposite. This was using people so I'd never have to see myself. The silence was the thing I couldn't sit with, so I made sure it never got quiet. So that's mine. Now let's talk about yours. And before you tell me you don't have one, if you're going to be part of these conversations, let's not lie to each other. Because the people most sure they don't have a vice are usually just better at hiding it, sometimes even from themselves. So don't think about the habit. Think about the reach. There's a moment I want you to find. The day finally goes still, the noise stops, and something rises up in you. You can't even name it, restlessness, emptiness, a weight in your chest that wasn't there a minute ago. And right there, in that moment, something happens. Your hand moves towards your phone before you've decided to pick it up. You're pouring the drink before you remember choosing to. You're going to look for someone before you ever ask yourself why. There's a gap, a tiny window between feeling that thing and doing something to make it stop. That window has a name. That's the reach. It's not the drink. It's not the scroll. It's not the text you send at midnight. It's the half second before. And it happens so fast, you've never watched it. And that's the problem. The reach lives in the dark. In the half second, you never look at. So now you can see it. And now you have a name for it. And here's what I need you to understand about it it works. That's the trap. If it didn't work, you would have stopped a long time ago. The drink does quiet the noise. The scroll does numb the night. The person does fill the silence for an hour, for a night, for as long as it lasts, and then it wears off. And the thing you were running from is still there, waiting, a little bigger than before, because the reach doesn't just fail to fix it, it feeds it. Every time you reach instead of sit, you teach yourself a lesson. I can't handle this. I need the thing. You're not just avoiding the discomfort. You're training yourself to believe you can't survive it. And that belief is the real cost. Not the wasted hours, not the hangover, not the people you used and called it something else. The cost is the quiet conviction don't one reach at a time. That you cannot be alone with your own mind. And here's the part that turns it all around. The discomfort was never the enemy. The discomfort was the message. The restlessness you keep drowning is not noise. It's a signal. It's the part of you that already knows something is off. Something you're avoiding. Something you're not building. Somewhere you're supposed to be going and you're not. Every time you reach, you silence the one voice that was trying to tell you where to go. So discipline isn't quitting the vice. Discipline is staying in the room long enough to hear what it was trying to say. And over time, the vice does something you don't even notice while it's happening. It starts eating away at your identity. Not all at once, but slowly, one reach at a time. Because every time you choose the vice over the silence, you lose a little ground. A little of the person you could have become in that quiet, gone, traded for relief that didn't last. And eventually the vice stops being something you do and becomes something you are. You stop saying I drink too much and start saying I'm just a drinker. You stop saying I keep running from people and start saying I'm just not the relationship type. You stop saying I avoid the silence and start saying that's just how I'm wired. Here's what's happening there. You took behavior, something you do, something you could change, and you turned it into identity, something you are, something permanent. And the second you do that, you're free. Free from having to change, because you can't change what you are. That's The most comfortable lie there is. I told it for years. This is just who I am. I love people. I'm social. It's just my nature. No, it was avoidance. And I dressed it up as an identity so I'd never have to put it down. That's the theft. Device doesn't just take your time. It takes the person you were supposed to be building in all those quiet moments you ran from. And then it hands you a story. So you won't go looking for ⁓ This is just who you are. Well it's not. You are not your vice. You're the one underneath it, the one it's been quietly stealing from this whole time. So the next time the day gets quiet, pay attention. Notice the gap. Notice the reach. And just once, don't answer it. Don't reinvent your life overnight. Don't try to become someone else by morning. Just stay, stay in the room long enough to hear what you've been trying so hard to silence. Because the discomfort was never the enemy. It was the message, the restlessness, the grief. It wasn't there to destroy you. It was trying to tell you something. And maybe that's the tragedy of a vice. Not that it steals your time, not that it costs you money, not even that it hurts the people around you. Instead it keeps introducing you to the same version of yourself while quietly taking away the person you could have become. The vice was never the truth about you. It was the cover story. You are not the thing you reach for. You are the one underneath it, the one still waiting in the silence, the one you've been outrunning your entire life. So be honest about what you've reached for, about what it's cost you. About what you've been trying not to face, and then sit down. Because the silence was never empty. It was waiting to tell you who you are and who you still have time to become. This is Yin. If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Not everyone, just someone who's ready. You can find Yin Worldwide Podcast on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. And if you want to go deeper, Visit our website at liveyen dot com. That's www.livin dot com. Subscribe if you're committed to the work. If not, that's fine too. This isn't for everyone. Remember, move with intention.