I’d really appreciate some outside perspective here, because I’m struggling to tell if I handled this badly or if it was just a misunderstanding.

I’ve been working on an idea for a program that combines travel with structured reflection and group conversations (kind of like a guided personal growth experience layered on top of a trip).

Recently, I tried to test this idea with a group of close friends. We already had a China trip planned together, and I thought it could be a good opportunity to simulate what the experience might feel like.

So I introduced the idea and asked them to make a decision as if it were real — including the possibility of paying for the experience. I made it clear that:

- joining the program was optional

- payment was optional

- there was no pressure either way

My goal was to get more realistic reactions, instead of people just saying “sounds cool” without thinking it through.

However, one of my closest friends reacted quite negatively. She felt uncomfortable and said it seemed like I was trying to monetise a trip that was originally just among friends.

That genuinely surprised me, and it made me question whether I crossed a line without realising it.

Looking back, I can see how introducing money into an existing friendship setting might change the dynamic, even if it’s optional — but I’m not sure if that’s the main issue, or if I just handled it poorly.

Was this an inappropriate way to test an idea?

Is bringing money into a pre-existing friend context inherently uncomfortable, even if it’s optional?

Or does this come down more to how I communicated it?

Would really appreciate honest thoughts — even if it’s critical.

I’d really appreciate some outside perspective here, because I’m struggling to tell if I handled this badly or if it was just a misunderstanding.

I’ve been working on an idea for a program that combines travel with structured reflection and group conversations (kind of like a guided personal growth experience layered on top of a trip).

Recently, I tried to test this idea with a group of close friends. We already had a China trip planned together, and I thought it could be a good opportunity to simulate what the experience might feel like.

So I introduced the idea and asked them to make a decision as if it were real — including the possibility of paying for the experience. I made it clear that:

- joining the program was optional

- payment was optional

- there was no pressure either way

My goal was to get more realistic reactions, instead of people just saying “sounds cool” without thinking it through.

However, one of my closest friends reacted quite negatively. She felt uncomfortable and said it seemed like I was trying to monetise a trip that was originally just among friends.

That genuinely surprised me, and it made me question whether I crossed a line without realising it.

Looking back, I can see how introducing money into an existing friendship setting might change the dynamic, even if it’s optional — but I’m not sure if that’s the main issue, or if I just handled it poorly.

Was this an inappropriate way to test an idea?

Is bringing money into a pre-existing friend context inherently uncomfortable, even if it’s optional?

Or does this come down more to how I communicated it?

Would really appreciate honest thoughts — even if it’s critical.

We live in an age where it feels like a hundred things every day are conspiring to make us anxious.

Parents are anxious about parenting. Founders are anxious about their companies. Employees are anxious about hitting their numbers. Husbands are anxious about providing. Wives are anxious about whether they can hold a career and a family at the same time.

What I want to share today comes from reading Rollo May's The Meaning of Anxiety. Maybe it can help you understand — in this universally anxious era — what it would actually take to live as someone who isn't.

Are more capable people more anxious?

If we want to escape anxiety, we should probably first understand where it comes from.

Rollo May, in The Meaning of Anxiety, makes two claims that flip the usual narrative on its head:

(1) Anxiety is the normal state of a person who, when threatened, still wants to create themselves.
(2) In our era, the people who feel anxious are actually the healthy ones — the ones tuned to the pulse of the time.

In other words: in this era, every normal person is at least a little anxious.

He also argues that the higher a person's possibility — their creative capacity — the higher their potential anxiety.

The most anxious people are usually the more learned, the more creative, the ones who insist on freedom.

Why? Because vision, ability, and ambition give you the freedom to choose. And once there's choice, there's uncertainty. And uncertainty produces anxiety.

So if you're someone who can't sit still, who's always restless to build something — you're probably going to live with anxiety for the rest of your life. The real question is how to live with it well.

Almost all anxiety comes from one question

To know what to do with anxiety, we have to look at its source.

After studying anxiety for decades, May arrived at a striking conclusion: anxiety is far more than an emotion. At its root, it's the urgent sense that you have a life to make meaningful.

Its meaning is to remind you: you know your life is more than this.

It's that urgency that makes us grab at every opportunity, terrified of missing out. We're in a hurry to succeed, or in a hurry to make our kids succeed. We're permanently dissatisfied — with the situation, with ourselves.

>Anxiety is the unease that arises when something you treat as essential to your existence is threatened.

The situations vary, and the values people depend on vary, but the threat is always to something you regard as fundamental to who you are.

If you pay close attention to your anxiety in the moment it appears, and ask yourself which part of your sense of value is being threatened, you'll find the root.

If you find yourself often anxious about your work, your marriage, or your child, ask: which underlying value is being threatened?

Don't escape anxiety — walk through it

Anxiety's special bond with personal value also tells us what its meaning isn't. The point isn't to "eliminate" anxiety, or to "avoid" it. It's to walk through it.

Here are six methods that work, easiest to deepest:

1. Meditate. Meditation is one of the most effective ways to manage anxiety. Steve Jobs had a famously volatile temper, but became almost preternaturally calm when working on a product. He credited his daily meditation practice.
2. Make a plan and take responsibility for finishing it. A lot of the time, we already know how to solve the problem — anxiety has just inflated it. The moment you start mapping a real path forward, and committing to walk it, anxiety stops being torture and turns into momentum.
3. Let yourself make mistakes. A lot of anxiety comes from a single posture: never permitting yourself to be wrong. Research is clear that perfectionism leads to depression and anxiety, and erodes quality of life. If that's you, the most urgent work is to stop judging yourself so harshly and start letting yourself be imperfect.
4. Negative feelings are not facts. Write them down and check. One of the hardest jobs in therapy is convincing an anxious client that their guilt and shame are based on a misreading of reality. Many negative thoughts are deeply internalized, planted in the unconscious. So write them down — "my coworkers don't like me" — and then go check whether the evidence actually supports them. You'll discover most of your negative emotions are imagination, not fact.
5. Find the root behind the anxiety. Learn to identify, specifically, what feels threatened. Often you don't even need to fix the threat — the moment you see it clearly, your anxiety drops by half.
6. Pre-imagine the worst-case outcome. Think clearly about the worst possible result of the thing you're anxious about, and ask yourself if you could accept it. If the answer is yes, the anxiety is now bounded — and you can start moving.

Some people say anxiety is the most useless emotion. I think it has its uses. It reminds us that a problem exists. It forces us to face threats and challenges.

You may, by this point, accept Rollo May's point: one of the few gifts of living in an "age of anxiety" is that we have no choice but to come to know ourselves.

The Meaning of Anxiety is, at its core, a book that hands you back your power. It reminds us that anxiety is a teacher — one that, if we let it, will guide us toward the lives we were meant to live.

We live in an age where it feels like a hundred things every day are conspiring to make us anxious.

Parents are anxious about parenting. Founders are anxious about their companies. Employees are anxious about hitting their numbers. Husbands are anxious about providing. Wives are anxious about whether they can hold a career and a family at the same time.

What I want to share today comes from reading Rollo May's The Meaning of Anxiety. Maybe it can help you understand — in this universally anxious era — what it would actually take to live as someone who isn't.

Are more capable people more anxious?

If we want to escape anxiety, we should probably first understand where it comes from.

Rollo May, in The Meaning of Anxiety, makes two claims that flip the usual narrative on its head:

(1) Anxiety is the normal state of a person who, when threatened, still wants to create themselves.
(2) In our era, the people who feel anxious are actually the healthy ones — the ones tuned to the pulse of the time.

In other words: in this era, every normal person is at least a little anxious.

He also argues that the higher a person's possibility — their creative capacity — the higher their potential anxiety.

The most anxious people are usually the more learned, the more creative, the ones who insist on freedom.

Why? Because vision, ability, and ambition give you the freedom to choose. And once there's choice, there's uncertainty. And uncertainty produces anxiety.

So if you're someone who can't sit still, who's always restless to build something — you're probably going to live with anxiety for the rest of your life. The real question is how to live with it well.

Almost all anxiety comes from one question

To know what to do with anxiety, we have to look at its source.

After studying anxiety for decades, May arrived at a striking conclusion: anxiety is far more than an emotion. At its root, it's the urgent sense that you have a life to make meaningful.

Its meaning is to remind you: you know your life is more than this.

It's that urgency that makes us grab at every opportunity, terrified of missing out. We're in a hurry to succeed, or in a hurry to make our kids succeed. We're permanently dissatisfied — with the situation, with ourselves.

>Anxiety is the unease that arises when something you treat as essential to your existence is threatened.

The situations vary, and the values people depend on vary, but the threat is always to something you regard as fundamental to who you are.

If you pay close attention to your anxiety in the moment it appears, and ask yourself which part of your sense of value is being threatened, you'll find the root.

If you find yourself often anxious about your work, your marriage, or your child, ask: which underlying value is being threatened?

Don't escape anxiety — walk through it

Anxiety's special bond with personal value also tells us what its meaning isn't. The point isn't to "eliminate" anxiety, or to "avoid" it. It's to walk through it.

Here are six methods that work, easiest to deepest:

1. Meditate. Meditation is one of the most effective ways to manage anxiety. Steve Jobs had a famously volatile temper, but became almost preternaturally calm when working on a product. He credited his daily meditation practice.
2. Make a plan and take responsibility for finishing it. A lot of the time, we already know how to solve the problem — anxiety has just inflated it. The moment you start mapping a real path forward, and committing to walk it, anxiety stops being torture and turns into momentum.
3. Let yourself make mistakes. A lot of anxiety comes from a single posture: never permitting yourself to be wrong. Research is clear that perfectionism leads to depression and anxiety, and erodes quality of life. If that's you, the most urgent work is to stop judging yourself so harshly and start letting yourself be imperfect.
4. Negative feelings are not facts. Write them down and check. One of the hardest jobs in therapy is convincing an anxious client that their guilt and shame are based on a misreading of reality. Many negative thoughts are deeply internalized, planted in the unconscious. So write them down — "my coworkers don't like me" — and then go check whether the evidence actually supports them. You'll discover most of your negative emotions are imagination, not fact.
5. Find the root behind the anxiety. Learn to identify, specifically, what feels threatened. Often you don't even need to fix the threat — the moment you see it clearly, your anxiety drops by half.
6. Pre-imagine the worst-case outcome. Think clearly about the worst possible result of the thing you're anxious about, and ask yourself if you could accept it. If the answer is yes, the anxiety is now bounded — and you can start moving.

Some people say anxiety is the most useless emotion. I think it has its uses. It reminds us that a problem exists. It forces us to face threats and challenges.

You may, by this point, accept Rollo May's point: one of the few gifts of living in an "age of anxiety" is that we have no choice but to come to know ourselves.

The Meaning of Anxiety is, at its core, a book that hands you back your power. It reminds us that anxiety is a teacher — one that, if we let it, will guide us toward the lives we were meant to live.

I left my previous company due to burnout and hoping to find a company where I can see more sense of fulfillment...

but here I am after 3 months, I hate the job... it's just not the right setup, not the right team and not what was promised...

So I was really deciding to quit, but then I see so many other friends are eagerly applying for the job... that made me feel so bad about my decision to quit....

but I don't know.. I am certain this is not the right place for me

I don't know what to do