It is half past one in the morning and the room is the colour of a screen. On it, a woman in robes is about to give her life for something — a person, a country, a vow she made in a courtyard ten episodes ago. She is fearless. She is brilliant. She has a mission so clear it could cut glass, and a love she would die inside of without hesitating. I am crying a little, the good kind of crying, the kind that feels like being filled.

And then the episode ends, and there is another, and I press the small arrow, and somewhere far below the warmth a tiredness is starting that will still be in my body when the alarm goes at seven. The page I meant to write today is blank. It has been blank for a while.

I want to tell you what I finally understood about that room, because I think you have a version of it. Maybe yours is a series too. Maybe it is the news, or other people’s houses on your phone, or the careers of strangers, or a game. The surface changes. The machine underneath is the same, and it is very old.

Three hundred and fifty years ago Pascal wrote one sentence that has been following me around: the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. He called it divertissement — diversion, the turning-away. Not turning toward pleasure, exactly. Turning away from something we do not want to sit in front of. The king, he noticed, surrounds himself with courtiers and hunts and wars not because he lacks anything, but so that he will never have an empty hour in which to feel his own condition. We are all that king. The screen is the hunt. I had simply never noticed that I was running, because running, when it glows and has subtitles, looks so much like resting.

But here is the part that turned the whole thing over for me, and it is the part I most want to hand to you.

Ask yourself what you actually feel when the diversion grips you hardest. Not what you are watching — what you are reaching for. I wrote my own list, in the dark, half-ashamed: I love them because they are brave. Because they have found a mission worth their whole life. Because they are fair, and strong-willed, and they suffer for something instead of nothing. Because they are seen, and it does not destroy them.

I thought I was admiring strangers. I was being handed a portrait of myself I refuse to sign.

Because I have a mission I would give my life to. I have said, out loud, I would rather die trying. I have been strong-willed enough to build things from nothing and stubborn enough to keep a practice for twenty-five years. The qualities I wept at on the screen at one in the morning were not foreign to me. They were mine, disowned — sent out to live on other people because to claim them in my own name would mean being visible, and visible has always felt dangerous.

Jung had a phrase for what gets passed down when we will not live our own lives: the unlived life. He was writing about parents, about how nothing presses on a child like the dreams a mother or father never dared to live. But the unlived life does not only fall on our children. It falls on our evenings. It has to go somewhere. If you will not live it forward, into your own days, it backs up and finds a screen, and there it gets lived for you, by someone with a costume budget.

James Hollis says the question of the second half of life — and I am fifty-one, so this is my hour — is exactly this: what is the life that has not yet been lived, and what is it waiting for? I had been answering that question every night, with a remote control, and calling the answer relaxation.

I do not think the dramas are the enemy. I have stopped believing in enemies that live inside ordinary pleasures. I think they are a messenger, and a precise one. They tell me, with great accuracy, the exact nutrient I am starving for: consequence. A life that matters on a scale I can feel in my chest. Beauty. Devotion. A self that is allowed to want enormous things out loud.

The messenger is not the problem. The problem is what I do when it arrives. I can receive the hunger as information — and go feed it for real, in my own name, on my own page, with my own face eventually — or I can keep swallowing the picture of the meal and waking up hungry.

So now, when the pull comes, I try to ask one question before I press the arrow: which of these qualities is already mine, and unsigned? It is a strange question. It does not make the pull disappear. But it turns the screen from a hole I fall into back into a mirror I can read — and a mirror, at least, points the right way: not at someone else’s destiny, but at the one I keep leaving in the dark.

The miracle you keep watching other people perform is not out of reach. It is the one you would be performing yourself, the moment you stop watching: a frightened person, doing the brave thing anyway, with no soundtrack and no audience and the alarm set for six.

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The first of five essays in Keep the Fire Moving. Next: what is actually in the room when the screen goes dark — and the difference between an ache you flee and an ache you can sit beside.