You're Probably Asleep Right Now

Anthony de Mello spent years as a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist telling rooms full of people, gently and often hilariously, that they were asleep. Not lazy. Not bad. Asleep — moving through entire marriages, careers, and decades on autopilot, waiting for something outside themselves to finally arrive and make it count.

His diagnosis for what actually causes unhappiness wasn’t circumstance. It was attachment — which he defined precisely, not as “caring about things” but as the belief that without this particular thing or person, you cannot be okay. Swap the object and the mechanism stays identical: the promotion, the relationship, the retirement date, the version of yourself you’ll finally be once the right thing happens. Different names, same locked door.

He wasn’t selling detachment as coldness. He was pointing at something closer to comedy: watch how much of your day runs on the assumption that happiness is a delivery that hasn’t arrived yet. Most people, he said, marry in their sleep and die in their sleep, never once catching themselves mid-nap.

This is the Tenant’s oldest trick, and it barely needs updating for right now — it just changed delivery methods. It used to whisper “once you get the job.” Now it refreshes a feed and calls it checking.

De Mello’s whole method for waking up was almost insultingly simple: notice. Not fix, not achieve, not transcend. Just notice you’re asleep, in this exact moment, doing the thing. He said noticing was the whole trick — the moment you see the sleep, some part of you is already awake watching it happen.

Where are you on autopilot right now?