Has this ever happened to you? You’re eating lunch and flipping absent-mindedly through Oprah magazine when a picture of chocolate catches your eye. But not just any chocolate: this is artisan chocolate, made “using the same processing techniques Mayans and Aztecs relied on thousands of years ago.” It seems that Los Angeles chocolatier Patricia Tsai was inspired to produce it after tasting traditionally made chocolate while on a tour of the Yucatan.

A little spark of anxiety ignites at the base of your spine. You put down your sandwich and look up from your magazine. Because you’ve just realized something incredibly important: what you do isn’t what you were meant to do. And unless you want to live a life of constant regret, you must chuck it immediately and pursue the [profoundly fulfilling] thing that is your true calling. Stephen Cope, in his book, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, calls this living along the spine of your dharma.

But there’s something else, too. It isn’t just that you’re doing the wrong thing. It’s that you’re doing the too big thing. The thing you now know you should be doing is (you believe, because you have no real understanding of it) deliciously, delightfully “small”. What could possibly be involved in being a chocolatier (even one who takes a cue from primitive societies) besides throwing together some cocoa and milk, stirring it up, and then hanging out in your shop all day in the hippest part of a hip town, selling to hipsters? Although to clarify, it’s not the alleged “easy” part that lures you. It’s that you know the profoundest satisfaction sprouts from the belly of single-minded purpose.

And it is, of course, an illusion, a fantasy, a hold-over from the days of childhood when all that was required to be a superhero was to dress like one and all it took to be a mommy was to carry a plastic baby around by its hair. There’s a reason stories about simplifying our life, and movies about romantic love, get to us, and it’s precisely because there’s no “there” there. We don’t hear (or we don’t listen to) the parts about the ego pain or financial struggle or long hours involved in retrofitting a career. And lovers in movies never go the bathroom, run out of dinner conversation, or pluck chin hairs.

Which is not to say you should go back to your Oprah magazine and your sandwich and blot out the voices in your head telling you to make a change. One of the funniest things my father ever said was something he didn’t intend to be funny: “Everything means something to you, doesn’t it, Dr. R.?” As Dr. R. was a shrink, this kind of went without saying.

It’s the same with the chatter in your head. Listen, but maybe don’t take it literally. I’m thinking the chatter is more like dream imagery: messages couched in symbolism, waiting to be unravelled. I’m actually pretty happy doing what I do, and certain I don’t want to chuck it all to source chocolate. But the idea that there’s some other part of my life “seeking the spine”? Now that’s something worth considering.