Start Living... Later is Too Late!

You Too Can Take Full Advantage of Your Youth & Start Living, for The Small Price of Discomfort

Unfortunately, the greatest challenge facing youth of the 21st century isn’t climate change, the fast fashion epidemic, global viruses with murder mutations, or the impending self-sabotaging crisis that has made a generation more insecure and self-aware than any before them. It’s the “Human Disease”, or at least that’s what Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals thinks.

Let's play a little game of would you rather... Which water form would you rather be?

OPTION A

OPTION B

If you choose option B, please email me and we'll have a chat. (However, I do occasionally feel like the pond, so nothing gained nothing lost).

As a twenty-one-year-old, I should be out living, kissing people, jumping off things, jumping into things. But, instead, I’m wondering if I should be instituting lunch break walks to ensure that I don’t experience the many detriments to one’s body that come from sitting stagnant for ten hours of the day. But in truth, I’m terrified of becoming still-water, putrid, dead and unmoving. I’m terrified that the nine-to-five or in my case, four-by-ten lifestyle will suck the vivacity and joy of life that I hold so dear to my youth into the straw of corporate America. Slurp.

I hadn’t realized that this is what ‘growing up’ means. Accepting corporate America at face value means melting into the chair with adequate lumbar support then coming home and decaying your brain with more abusive screen time. The schedule makes you forget that you’re supposed to have hobbies, passions, ambitions and goals for yourself because sometimes you’re so tired from sitting still that you forget to move.

If you’re 21, chances are you’ve been told that you need to put the work in now to get that next promotion, or to set yourself up for a good job in the future, but those 40 hours will still look like 40 hours. I think we’ve been discouraged from seeking out and pursuing side hustles that fill our cups and make life an adventure, because it doesn’t help the system, potentially.

I love my job. I couldn’t be happier in my life. I just was accepted into graduate school, which means hours and hours of more work for the weekends, but at the same time I’m also terrified of missing out on life, so I set a new goal for myself: Derive as much pleasure from life as possible.

Oliver Burkeman says that you should ask yourself five questions on how you’re obliged to make tough choices with your limited time (He makes the point that as humans we’re going to live and die, so your only actionable choice is to choose how to make yourself happiest during them.) These questions are as follows:

1. “where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?”

2. “Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?”

3. “In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?”

4. “In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?” Trick question – you never will feel like you know.

5. “How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?” or who would see the attempts.

And as a naive 21 year old, I think these questions are great guiding questions, because they push you from the comfort of your mildewed and condensed happiness towards being the person that you envy from the other side of the screen--a person out experiencing and living. For some reason we’ve been conditioned not to believe that we can have both. We’ve also been told that life can’t be ours. Whether it's ourselves being afraid of pursuing the impossible alone, or the fear that someone will think us stupid for reaching up, we’ve been lulled into a false sense of worth and become too timid to respond.

In each of these questions, I think the answers boil down to how many moments you’re feeling completely out of your comfort zone and pursuing the kind of discomfort that forces you to just grow, grow, grow. When you’re a little kid, you might not have realized the freedom that came with being viewed as an undeveloped little mind that can make mistakes, but now that people treat you like an adult by giving you responsibilities, I think you might’ve forgotten that you’re in the stage of life where you’re supposed to fail and fail again and try things out as hard as possible. How hard you’re trying and failing is the true determinant of success in your 20s.

By design, I’m a person who is safe, loves to care what other people think. Despite my better attempts, I’m not a person who would write a book and give it to someone to read. Most of my work, even this blog, is hidden behind the screen. But that’s not living. In ten years, I’m gonna be dead and if some person cleaning out my cluttered writing desk comes across this and says, hmm this isn’t half bad, what good is that going to do for me? There’s no ‘do it later’ defense in death. Just excuses.

Now, what I’m searching for in life is an experience that causes me to “experience ‘deep time,’ the sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead,” (20). These experiences--climbing mountains, diving deeply into your passions, signing up for a 5k because your young body can handle it--are what we're made for in your 20s. Selfishly, I believe that they were also made for your 30s, 40s, 50s and midlife crises, because I never want to stop living, but I can concede that you’ll never be as fit or full of opportunity as the present.

So, I challenge you to take pause when you’re staring at the white walls of work and consider how you’re going to experience the feeling that you might get standing atop a mountain--eyes watering slightly, pupils dilated, lungs expanding and contracting with slight exertion from the excitement of having summited a mountain of your own creation. That’s a life that I think is worth living--the kind that makes you forget that you’re alive because the moment is in itself life.

Today is your weekend. I promise you that there is time to find those experiences right now, and I challenge you: stop reading now and go do it, even if it is for fifteen minutes. Find out what you actually love to do and want from life. Start writing the book. Go find a mountain. Go for a run in the rain. Make a pitch to someone for your dream career. All it takes is standing and disrupting the stagnancy of your water until soon it is fresh, flowing and unstoppable, sweeping the doubts away in your wake.