Shadowing Practice: I don’t understand what we’re living for - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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I don't know what I'm living for.
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Life feels so painfully empty that it's something I don't even feel like I can even ignore anymore.
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I've spent most of my life just following rules or following missions
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and goals I thought were supposed to be the answer to the emptiness in my heart.
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I'd blame it on my weight, I blame it on my appearance, I blame it on some random accolade that I need to achieve
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and then I can start living my life then things can maybe begin to make sense.
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A lot of the time I'd also use
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that goal post as a way to tell myself well I know something deeper is wrong
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but I first need to reach this goal to have a little bit of a barrier
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or a protection and then I can begin to go to that vulnerable place.
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The issue is I have been doing this for so long
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that I am not even sure that there's a life worth living behind that.
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What I mean is I am somebody that overthinks a lot, if you want to call it overthinking.
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I'm someone that just thinks too much about things and I'm sure you are too.
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You try and understand the world a bit too much
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and it ruins the experience because you can't seem to make sense of it
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and you can't seem to make sense of yourself in it, especially when you have pain.
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And I remember throughout my childhood and adolescence, I spent a lot of time thinking about relationships,
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about people, about what made people love you.
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Because for me, if I made people love me, everything would be okay.
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That was my main goal in life.
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I needed to make as many people as possible love me and to do that I had to play a role.
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I had to do this very specific formula I'd figured out a
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while back to making someone love you and it was about not being too honest, it was about pretending this.
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Anyways I won't go into the details about that random thing
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but what I mean is what that represented for me was a way out of the suffering, it was a way out of the emptiness
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and a feeling of having a footing somewhere
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that made sense on this earth and obviously as the years went on
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and my mental illness got worse and I lost
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so much due to these very problematic behaviours and I realised
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that they burnt me out more than they could ever save me.
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I was forced in many therapy sessions to sit with myself and think about what would it look like to change?
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What would it look like to not live this way, to let go of all these beliefs?
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And I'm sure like a lot of you, the answer is often, I don't know, I've never thought about that.
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It's never even felt like a possibility.
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And to be honest, the whole idea of it sounds like a just a lie, a fantasy.
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it doesn't seem real and my argument about that was that well
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if it was real I would see happy people I would see conflicting evidence in my everyday life
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and I would have seen it up until now
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but I don't feel like I do when I look to the outside to try and first to try and begin
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to find out what could possibly make someone want to live, make someone enjoy this experience of life.
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It often feels like I'm trying to understand an equation.
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Like an equation, you can probably solve it and someone will explain it to you slowly.
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But at the end of the day, it just feels like a concept.
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it's it's just letters and it's just numbers
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and we've decided they mean something
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and I feel like I am unable to fall back in love with life
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when I think of relationships friendships romantic relationships goals career aspirations lifestyle hobbies I just feel confused
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and it's a weird type of confusion it's not like the type of confusion
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that feels like it can ever be worked through it's like
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when you go through deep suffering you can either go one of two ways you can either grow
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and learn a lot or you can crash and burn
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but I also think there can sometimes to be this weird
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middle ground where it's like the veil of what life really
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is gets lifted you see behind the scenes you see the the fantasy isn't real you see
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that friendships relationships a lot of it is selfish this unconditional love doesn't exist
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because through your trauma you were forced to deeply perceive relationships
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and realize that things were not unconditional and you that to protect yourself.
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In friendships you could say well they're your friend until you start to be very inconvenient.
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Let's say if you became really really really depressed people often say well that's what friends are for
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but quietly they actually mean I will be your friend until this doesn't stop fast enough because everyone feels selfish,
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which is our natural way of being.
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So it's hard for me to fall back into the fantasy that, well, that's worth it because I don't feel anything for it anymore.
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Hobbies, I see the concept of them, I see goals, I see the concept of them, I'm like yeah but what is that for?
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If I am just still pursuing something to prove something, to use up this time on earth just to use it up,
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it feels empty, it all feels empty and it's like I can't see the point in anything anymore.
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It feels like this horrible veil has been lifted and I cannot fall back under the trance, the illusion of it all being worth it,
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of it all having meaning, because obviously the meaning is created by the person.
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But if I fundamentally disagree with everything that is around me, where do you go from there?
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If I see relationships and friendships as this fake performance no matter what
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if goals feel like another way of trying to you know prop myself up
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and and prove to the world or prove to myself
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or something that i'm worth something
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if my career feels again like this weird thing of this
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popularity thing this thing of feeling like oh i'm better than this person
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and this person this protects me more or kids
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or whatever makes people want to do things it just all feels like some iteration of the same shit.
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Just playing this game that I just, you can't win at.
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I don't feel connected to it.
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And I don't know what you do with that.
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I used to run away from this feeling by finding my meaning in literally, like I said previously, trying to make people love me.
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Trying to do everything I could to be this illusion.
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But that's not possible anymore and it doesn't even work long term.
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The main question I have after all of this is what do people live for?
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I do not understand any of it.
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I bring myself oftentimes on the weekend to lakes,
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to towns, and I try and just put my body into the situations to maybe create some spark again,
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you know, something that wants to be here, that feels something, that feels this pull, this beauty.
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I don't feel similar to somebody that has seen something that's
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so violently horrendous that even when they're out of that situation
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and they're back home safe with their family and with everything they could ever want, they just cannot fall back into love with life.
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They just feel empty and they feel disconnected from people around them and they feel like everything is just empty.
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Honestly, it scares me.
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It really does.
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because you don't hear a lot about
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that part I feel I feel like you hear a lot
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about people talking about very specific things they struggle with
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and wanting specific solutions but this feels more existential
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and it doesn't feel like it's something that I can answer
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and I think a lot of us feel this way
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and it's horrible it's absolutely horrible because it's something that is so so all-encompassing.
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It feels so much deeper than anything that anyone tries to make you worry about every day, yet you're still forced to play the role, play the performance, get up,
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go to work, put on a face and pretend you're not dealing with this.
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Try and do things on the weekend, you feel fundamentally pointless and I don't want to become a monk.
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I know oftentimes the answer to these things is, well, you've risen above the whole ego thing or you've risen above the whole
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role that society wants you to play
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and you've seen how empty it all is and you have to follow a different path.
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I don't want to follow a different path.
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I just want to enjoy my life.
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I just want to feel young because I spent my entire teenage years feeling like a 30, 40, I don't know.
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Now I'm in my early 20s and I've got my life back together,
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yet I can just sit in a room filled with peers my age and I just cannot connect to them.
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I cannot understand how they feel and I can't understand how I feel in that moment.
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No matter how much I try, no matter how much alcohol I drink, I just can't get there.
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It's like you get the first curse of dealing with these issues and then you get the double whammy of like,
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hey, and now these are fundamentally going to alienate you even more from people due to that experience itself,
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even if it's healed.
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so yeah the meaning of life i know everyone wonders that
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but i guess this is just something i wanted to vent i wanted to just talk about
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that i definitely will keep talking about it
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because it's honestly something i just keep thinking about
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and ruminating over you're not alone feeling this way and it's deeply terrifying and it's just yeah anyways see ya
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “I don’t understand what we’re living for”. This video has 122 sentences and 1710 words to shadow. The speech runs for 10:45. The speaker talks at a natural 159 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| fundamentally adverb | In a fundamental or basic sense; reaching the very core of the matter. | |
| emptiness noun | The state or feeling of being empty; an emotion that combines hollowness, numbness, disconnection and a lack of meaning in life, resulting in existential… | |
| oftentimes adverb | /ˈɔf.ənˌtaɪmz/ | Frequently; often. |
| overthink verb | To think or analyze too much. | |
| unconditional adjective | /ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəl/ | Absolute; without conditions, limitations, reservations or qualifications. |
| veil noun | /veɪl/ | Something hung up or spread out to hide or protect the face, or hide an object from view; usually of gauze, crepe, or similar diaphanous material. |
| illusion noun | /ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/ | A distortion of sensory perception where real stimuli lead to a false or misleading impression of reality. |
| hobby noun | /ˈhɑ.bi/ | An activity that one enjoys doing in one's spare time. |
| equation noun | /ɪˈkweɪ.ʒən/ | The act or process of equating two or more things, or the state of those things being equal (that is, identical). |
| anyways adverb | /ˈɛn.iˌweɪz/ | Anyway, anyhow, in any case. |
| selfish adjective | /ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/ | Holding one's own self-interest as the standard for decision making. |
| confusion noun | /kənˈfjuːʒən/ | A lack of clarity or order. |
| accolade noun | /ˈæk.əˌleɪd/ | An expression of approval; praise. |
| adolescence noun | /ˌædəˈlɛsəns/ | The transitional period of physical and psychological development between childhood and maturity, beginning at the onset of puberty and with an endpoint… |
| alienate verb | /ˈeɪ.li.ə.neɪt/ | To convey or transfer to another, as title, property, or right; to part voluntarily with ownership of. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| fall back into verb | To return to old habits; to return to an unhealthy or unhappy situation. |
| fall back verb | To retreat. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| get up verb | To move in an upward direction; to ascend or climb. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| run away from verb | To avoid or shirk a problem or consequences; to rush to back away from or disclaim responsibility for something. |
| use up verb | To consume, deplete, expend, or exhaust. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I don't know what I'm living for.
- I don't feel connected to it.
- I don't want to follow a different path.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if it was real I would see |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've spent · I've never thought · we've decided |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was forced · be worked · were forced |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 50 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: unconditional /ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəl/, illusion /ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/, equation /ɪˈkweɪ.ʒən/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/, confusion /kənˈfjuːʒən/
- Long words — get the stress right: unconditional /ˌʌnkənˈdɪʃənəl/, adolescence /ˌædəˈlɛsəns/, alienate /ˈeɪ.li.ə.neɪt/, aspiration /ˌæspəˈɹeɪʃən/, inconvenient /ˌɪn.kənˈviːni.ənt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like fundamentally, emptiness, oftentimes.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.