The Mel Robbins Podcast
If You Feel Lost in Life, Listen to This One Conversation to Find Purpose & Meaning
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What insights does Ocean Vuong provide about feeling lost in life?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Have you ever read something and thought, how did they know exactly what I'm feeling? Well, that's what happened to me when I read the remarkable bestselling book, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vaughn.
It is one of my favorite books of all time because Ocean could just put words to emotions and experiences I didn't even know I had. It held up a mirror to the moments I've buried. It softened me in ways I didn't expect. And it reminded me, line by line, that beauty can still exist even in the hardest moments of life. Ocean Vaughn writes like no one else.
He just has this ability to capture grief, love, identity, and hardship with a kind of honesty that doesn't just land, it lingers. If your life doesn't look the way you thought it would by now, if you feel stuck, if you've been stretched thin and you're hiding how tired or lost you feel, if you've been quietly wondering, Does any of this matter? You are exactly where you need to be right now.
This conversation will help you reconnect with yourself. You'll hear what it means to build a meaningful life in the middle of uncertainty, hardship and struggle. You'll understand that you don't need to become someone else to be worthy. And you'll walk away with a deeper sense of peace, purpose and permission to be exactly where you are and who you are.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited you're here. It's such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this with you, well, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you, the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
If you feel lost in life, today's guest will help you find purpose and meaning. Ocean Vuong is a bestselling author and an award-winning poet. His debut novel, On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous, became an instant New York Times bestseller. It earned him the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, and the New England Book Award. That same year, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant.
He's also the author of two celebrated poetry collections, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His newest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, was chosen as Oprah's book club pick and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. And it's one of the best books I have ever read.
I give it to people as a gift over and over and over again. And after I read the book, I started researching more about Ocean and was so moved by some of the things he was sharing in interviews and some of the stuff he was writing about online, I knew that I had to get him here on the podcast.
Ocean is currently a tenured professor of creative writing at NYU, where he teaches in the MFA program for poetry and poetics. But what truly sets Ocean apart isn't the accolades. It's the way he writes. He puts words to what the rest of us only feel. And somehow, he turns our quietest pain into something meaningful. even beautiful. I cannot wait for you to meet Ocean.
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Chapter 2: How can we find meaning when we feel stuck or behind?
The work of poetry and language arts is to reclaim the strangeness and the beauty of language so that the wonder and awe at the heart of it is recycled and reclaimed back to everyday use. Language is a strategy that has always been historically used to control people.
And so when you realize that, oh, so much of this thing I use every day, when it goes into the hands of corporations and politicians, it's manipulating me then you realize, if I speak and use this material with deliberate attention and intention, then I can reclaim a portion of myself. And part of that is dignity.
And a lot of my work is, I'm interested in using language as a way to reconfirm self and communal dignity. What does the word dignity mean to you? The ability to... To live without shame and to be proud of parts of your life that people think are failures. Because in my short journey...
I've learned that all the struggles that me and my family have gone through, they were all also sites of innovation and creative struggle. So to me, I think dignity is about looking at what people have said to you that you should discard and realizing that it's always part of you and being proud of that as a process of who you are. So owning all of your parts is,
and not having to walk around with that shame, that to me is what dignity is. And to me, it's like, you're told that you got to go up, go up the mountain, and there'll be a light that will heal everything. And what I realized was how long and inefficient realizing that is. You know, it's like, when my... I was raised by illiterate women.
And because they were illiterate, they knew how powerful reading was. It was like sorcery to them, you know, because it's like, we don't know what it is, but we know the world runs with language.
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Chapter 3: What role does grief play in finding beauty and purpose?
So you have our blessing to go off and figure that out. I never had a mother that forced me to do this or that. She said, son, go off and learn what you can. And if you can't, there's always a seat next to me at the nail salon. So you go off, you go get your education. And for me, it was a long, circuitous path. It took me six years to get my undergraduate.
I went to four institutions, community college, business school, dropped out, what have you. But you go off and then you tell yourself, and I think this is particularly true of the immigrant and the refugee, but I think it's true for all children of the working poor.
You tell yourself, I'm going to go into that institution, and I'm going to figure it out, and I'm going to come back and give this thing that was locked away inside the university libraries. I'm going to give it to my family, and then we're going to find out why we're here and what happened to us.
Chapter 4: Why is it important to reconnect with our true selves?
So it's kind of this mining. And you realize that knowledge is so inefficient and it takes so long. Meanwhile, destruction is so efficient. You know, our social services are gutted overnight. by the stroke of a pen. Entire city blocks could be blown apart by weapons. It will take decades to heal and repair them. Destruction is so darn efficient.
I think human beings, one of our worst inventions was that we have found the way in the 20th century to make instant ruins. You know, before that, ruins took thousands of years to create. But now we can make ruins instantly. And we are still living in the aftermath of that.
And I think that's also a metaphor for reparative learning, which is what so much of class, being a class outsider is, right? You're brought up with so much shame.
What did growing up and feeling that shame that you feel when you're poor, when you're an outsider in a new country, What did that teach you about how to live in a world that is constantly sending messages that we don't support you, we're against you, there's something wrong with you? What did that teach you about life?
Shame is so perennial for so much of American life. It's very much true for the poor. I remember, you know... Like being in Stop and Shop, this local grocery store, and my mother like counting how many tomatoes she can afford.
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Chapter 5: How can we cultivate a calmer mindset during uncertain times?
And I just think, as a kid, you're sitting there, you're standing in line, and you're watching the cashier who's not that older than you. look away because we're all in one ecosystem. They're not making that much money. So it's just like poor folks together. But what's unspoken is that deep shame. And none of us knew why or how to ameliorate it.
And so you're sitting in line and you're watching your mom push two little plum tomatoes back. In the conveyor belt. And you're watching this kid who's probably four years old and you look out, look away because he knows, you know, out of respect. Again, that dignity, you know, like offering each other a little bit of dignity to look away. I'm sorry. Why are you apologizing?
Because I want to be clear and my voice, it wobbles.
You're very clear. Okay, thank you. And I've had the experience, but only I'm the mother, with the kids standing next to me.
Chapter 6: What practical strategies can help us shift our thinking positively?
And I had the line rehearsed for when the credit card would not go through. Yeah. And I would always cock my head and kind of look surprised and go, well, that's weird because it just worked at the gas station. Yeah. And then I'd say, come on, kids, let's go out to the car. I've got another cart out there, which I didn't.
Chapter 7: How does Ocean Vuong redefine success and personal worth?
And you don't forget that. Yeah. But everybody knows and nobody knows how to talk about it, how to make it right. And looking away in that moment is a form of respect because you don't want the person who's dealing with that heaviness to feel the weight of your judgment either.
Yeah.
And so please don't apologize for speaking and telling us the truth of your experience because, you know, for the person who doesn't know you, you're, in my opinion, one of the most... decorated and awarded writers alive right now. The American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the New England Book Award, the MacArthur Genius Grant. You are a professor at NYU.
And so while your story began growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, immigrating here from Vietnam, your mom and the women around you being illiterate and working in a nail salon, you went on to take back language and write about dignity in the human experience.
Gosh, Mel, thank you so much for that counter and that opening. I'm so grateful for that moment of grace because I think one of the things about moving through class systems is that you always assume what you're going to say is going to be not legible.
And I feel like both you and I know, and maybe a lot of your audiences knows too, where you walk into a room and you say, well, do I really say it like it is? And if I do, are they going to look at me like I'm crazy? or am I just outside the frame of understanding? And so you try to assume that what you're saying is a breach. So you have to apologize for that breach, right?
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm going to go here, but I feel like we need to go here, right? And you gave me such a beautiful moment of grace that I don't really experience in the spaces that I now traffic in. But I think there's two types of shame. There's the shame of who you are, which is ontological. What does that word mean? It's a big word. The shame of yourself.
For queerness, many people shame us for ourself, our ontological presence, our being, which we cannot change. And then there's the shame of action, of conduct, which I think can be really fruitful. It would be great if a lot of our politicians felt a little bit of shame, right? Because that means there's recognizing that you can act on it. You can do something. You can repair something. And
So I think in many cases, so much of my childhood was about both of those shames. The shame of being poor, which you had no control over. Then the shame of being queer, which you have no control over. And then the shame that what you're doing is not enough. So the shame of action. It's like, oh, I work so hard, but I'm not feeding my family. I work so hard, but I'm still stuck in this tenement.
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Chapter 8: What final thoughts does Ocean Vuong share about living a meaningful life?
I need to take a quick break, even though I don't want to take a break from this conversation. So I can give a chance for our sponsors to share a few words. And I also want to give you a chance, a chance to share this conversation and the wisdom that Ocean is unpacking for us with other people in your life who need to hear this.
And there are four people that I've been thinking about as we've been talking for the last couple minutes that I am going to be sharing this with right now. And don't go anywhere. There is so much more wisdom that we're going to unpack with Ocean Vaughn when we return. Stay with me. Welcome back. It's your buddy Mel Robbins.
And you and I have the honor of sitting with one of the most acclaimed literary figures and writers alive today, bestselling author and professor Ocean Vaughn. And we're talking about how to find purpose, meaning, and the quiet strength to keep going if you're feeling lost in life.
So Ocean, what I'd love to have you do is if you could speak directly to the person who's really resonating, because I know so many people will, And maybe they're in the job and they thought they'd only work at the restaurant for two or three years. And they're just getting by and they're starting to feel that dream of a different life slipping away. What do you want them to know?
I think for me, you have a myth of yourself. And, you know, the myth for myself is, was to be a business person because that's just what I thought where money was. So like when I was 15, I thought I was working in a tobacco farm. For cash, it was no Uncle Sam, no taxation, under the table, $9.50 an hour, way better than minimum wage, which is $7.15. And it was so interesting.
We lived in HUD housing, section eight. And my mother sat me down one day and said, son, I crunched the numbers and you need to get a job. You're about to be 16, but you got to just work at McDonald's. So can you imagine what happened to American Dream, upward mobility, do what you want, follow your destiny, right? I'm like, what? Excuse me? And she's like, no, no, no.
You can't even be the manager. You need to just be minimum wage because if you make any more, we'll be kicked out. And we won't be able to afford an apartment on the open market. So... Upward mobility could render you homeless. And then it clicked. I said, oh, no wonder every other teenager in my neighborhood is a drug dealer.
Because if you're a child to a single mom, and there were daughters and sons in that too, if you're a child to a single mother and you want to help her out, To get a job, if you get too much money, you're going to lose your housing. So what are you going to do? Sell weed on the side, get cash, put it on the mattress. Mom pays the light bill with her checks. You take her to the grocery store.
And I have seen folks do that. And I don't condone drug dealing. I've seen folks do that and move out and move on and stop that and have relatively economically successful lives. I've seen folks do that and end up in jail and die. So it's just a complete crapshoot, you know, and... So I went into the farm as a way to help my mother.
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