We are all searching for something. What that something might be is never really a certainty, but it typically displays itself as a nagging sense of something unfinished or a thing undone that plagues our days and troubles our sleep. It is a restlessness within the human heart described by St. Augustine as "...humanity's innate desire for the infinite..."
This restlessness is a metaphor for seeking after the infinite, for something larger than ourselves, but it is not always so much a seeking after God, as it is a coincident experience of universal expansion. We are not only living within the context of nature, but as a fellow traveler along with this unfinished and ever-expanding universe that we inhabit.
The emptiness confronting us compasses not only this notion, but the disconnection between our primordial, elemental nature and the mundane humanity of our daily lives. We fail to see the sacredness in all things, for want of something "more". And so, we try to fill this emptiness with things outside of ourselves -- objects, money, love, release or our perception of it, sex, drugs, new experiences, whatever is at hand. We also fail to see the sacredness in ourselves and, in doing so, visit upon ourselves all manner of violence, neglect and disregard.
What will, ultimately, fill this space? You will. You are what you are seeking. You are that thing left undone. You are your own higher power.
Evolving our potential is a full time occupation. It takes patience, self-acceptance, tolerance, humor, introspection and a willingness to face our own truth and speak it aloud. In facing our truth we must be willing to take responsibility for our own shortcomings, as well as be willing to address those shortcomings in a conscious and productive manner, while also making the effort to acknowledge our own strengths along the way.
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God fulfills, not us.
Though the prospect of being our "own higher power" may give comfort for a time, running on our own effort would prove to be exhausting. Hence this is why it would be, as you stated, a fulltime occupation, and I don't believe that our perpetual search to better ourselves could ever satisfy that God-shaped need. Our shortcomings are too great, and if one were to really look into their thoughts and emotions, they would find that most of those are not sacred at all but quite the opposite. I believe with all my heart that Jesus Christ is the only way to fullfill that searching desire in all of us, and I can say this only because that searching within myself stopped when I found Him. A freedom and grace followed that I had never felt before I knew Jesus Christ and how He died for me. The "God-shaped hole" is too great a hole to fill for us to try to do it by ourselves. That searching will always be there, and hence never be "solved" but only filled with doings and what can be accomplished with your work, which is depressingly small when compared with the Universe; and making sense of the Universe is what the God-shaped hole is yearning for.