Sarah will live her best life in about 15 years. She will marry a handsome, successful man and live in a sprawling suburban home with a pool, an outdoor kitchen, and a golden retriever. She will have three adorable children, and they will vacation as a family in the Caribbean. She will drive a Range Rover around town to meet her friends for dinner and drinks. She will be happy.
But right now, she is on her phone.
Sarah isn’t real, but the life she idealizes is one to which millions of human beings aspire. We don’t have to look any further than Twitter to find swarms of 20-somethings fantasizing about a cookie-cutter suburban lifestyle.
Exhibit A:
Maybe there are a few people out there who genuinely want the lifestyle equivalent of painting by numbers. But for everyone else, this desire could just be a symptom of suppressed uncertainty. Having no idea how we actually want our life to turn out prompts us to idealize a hyper-specific version of the future: Everything will be great…as long as I have A, B, C, X, Y, and Z.
Next thing you know, you’re pigeonholed into thinking some puffed-up lifestyle (that you didn’t even come up with) is the only remedy for the insecurity. But in reality, we’re just spinning our tires in the mud, ignoring the hard work of figuring out what a fulfilling life actually is.
“Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future,” says Oliver Burkeman. “Not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps us rid us of feelings of uncertainty.”
A couple of months ago I wrote about Rene Girard who noticed that we often don’t know what we want, so we imitate what other people want. If we have no real sense of purpose, it’s easier to just leave our goals on the default setting; we focus on ‘the life’ instead of our life. And even if we get ‘the life,’ the paradox is that you never actually become that person you dreamed (or tweeted) about. Ryan Holiday explained this in a recent article which is worth quoting at length:
Most of us who work very hard or drive ourselves to do things have this idea that when we get it, everything will be different. We’ll feel more whole. We’ll be satisfied. We’ll feel the way we made up in our heads that the people who first inspired us obviously felt. And when we get it? That’s where the awkward truth comes in: You really don’t feel anything different. You’re still you. Except now you’re you with a million dollars or a gold medal or a hot spouse or an office on the top of the building. And what you missed on your journey to get these things was your own gradual transformation. Your evolution.
We can put in the work and enjoy the ride; or we can reassure ourselves that our ‘best life’ is whatever everyone else says it should be. The choice is yours. But remember what the psychologist Erich Fromm said: “The quest for certainty blocks the quest for meaning.”
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