seize freedom when it’s most accessible to you
When we’re young, it feels like we will be that way forever.
It feels like forever that we will be laughing hard with our friends half drunk in bars, pulling glasses off of sticky counters, scrutinizing over Uber prices, gauging whether our friends also want to get fries to dull tomorrow’s hangover.
It feels like forever that we will be able to send a spontaneous text saying “want to go to a café and hang out all day? or come over and do nothing?”, and it feels like forever that we could get that same text and say yes to it.
It feels like forever that we will have the freedom to do what we want in the present, with the seemingly non-urgent voice occasionally nagging at us, wondering if we’re headed where we genuinely want to go…
The truth is that when we’re young, youth feels like it will go on forever. Like we will have options and freedom and plenty of future ahead, forever. This is true even for the intellectual ones among us, the self aware ones, the ones who “think ahead”.
One thing that seems consistent at any age is that processing the passage of time feels incomprehensible. There is no way to completely understand or anticipate the process of getting older, of releasing a small part of your potential each day. And yet it is happening. Without our consent, time is going by.
So, instead of trying to “figure out” time, perhaps we should focus on seizing the present. On doing what we want to do “one day”, today. Each day is one small tick on our life’s clock, the hand moving steadily, consistently, patiently but persistently around the circle.
It feels like we will have forever to decide what it is that we really want to do — not the thing we “kind-of-like, but aren’t sure if we’d do forever”.
It feels like we can ponder, wonder, and remain undecided, forever.
But it isn’t forever.
There isn’t any day that you have to decide by. No teacher that’s going to email you to say you’re going to fail if you don’t do this work. No parent over your shoulder telling you to do it so you can support your family one day.
There is no one. No one but you that can determine the trajectory of your own life. The True Trajectory: what you would do if you were listening to only you, and no one else.
No one will give you a deadline or a road map or an outline for how to figure out the Assignment of your own life. Only you can do that; only you can harness the discipline, the urgency, and the drive to really figure out what it is that you want. Only you can be truly honest with yourself.
Only you can look at that ticking hand and decide when to ramp things up — when to start really being you, embracing the parts of you that you often dull to “fit in” or “stay on the right path.”
And hey, being honest with ourselves isn’t easy. No one tells us how to do it. In fact, we’re taught quite early how to be dishonest with ourselves, how to look away from our truth, to avoid thinking about who we really want to be, how to numb ourselves from the pull we feel to things we are genuinely drawn to—all to fulfil society’s vision of who we should be. We are trained to look at ourselves through the eyes of others. To always seek approval, validation, claps and nods that we are on the right path, that we’re doing the Right Thing.
So, yeah, untangling the stream of decisions we make in search of approval is tough! It’s complicated. It requires deep thought and introspection, because the self knowledge needed to determine and follow our True Trajectory is buried so deeply inside us, under layers and layers of approval-seeking tissue that we literally need to mine our own mind to access it.
It’s incredibly confronting to tap into the true versions of ourselves. The version of ourselves that exists in absence of the desire to please others. We’re more comfortable being who society wants us to be than who we really are. We know ourselves better in the eyes of the external world (always acutely aware of how our actions will be ‘perceived’), than we know ourselves from an internal perspective (what do we think of who we’re becoming? Is this the person we really want to be? Do we even know what that looks like?).
The amount of personal responsibility it takes to actually live the life that we want is tremendous. It never ceases to amaze me how hard I have to work to figure out what it is that I am doing to get the approval of others, when I’m pursuing what I’ve been told to value, vs. what I am doing that stems from me, from what I value, from what I want, as an individual. Even distilling one act that is purely self directed (done completely for ourselves and no one else) can be a challenge.
I often think about this excerpt from one of my favourite articles of all time, 19 Great Truths My Grandmother Told Me on Her 80th Birthday:
There are thousands of people who live their entire lives on the default settings, never realizing they can customize everything. – Don’t settle for the default settings in life. Find your loves, your talents, your passions, and embrace them. Don’t hide behind other people’s decisions. Don’t let others tell you what you want. Design YOUR journey every step of the way! The life you create from doing something that moves you is far better than the life you get from sitting around wishing you were doing it.
Society isn’t designed to have everyone think independently - it would break! So it’s essential to remove any expectation of the world encouraging you to do the inner work of discovering a path that is true to you. If you’re lucky, maybe there’s a person or two in your life who see something special in you, and have encouraged you to follow your own path, to trust in your gifts. But many don’t even have this. The only thing we all have - for certain - is ourselves. It’s the one constant in life that we can rely on, and the only tool that we can decide to activate any time we want.
Sorting out our own truth is some of the most important work we can do on a personal level. It is essential to figure out what the North Star of our lives is (who we want to become), so we can set an aim and make choices that align with where we want to go.
The thing about chasing approval is that our desire for it is insatiable. There will always be another reward to chase, someone else’s approval to gain, another step on the ladder to climb. Re-orienting our choices around gaining our own personal approval allows us to focus on independently derived priorities, instead of constantly looking around to see what is “in” right now, what the approval game of the moment is.
We need to know where we’re aiming, because otherwise, we have no chance of getting there. Society is working over-time to reduce the critical thought we dedicate to our path. Always dangling another reward in front of us to distract us from the work of discovering who we are independent of the societal gaze we’re so used to posing for.
Lately I’ve been re-evaluating my choices through questions like: Would my 5 years ago self be proud of where I am now, of the decisions I’m making today? Am I making decisions in the present that would make my future self proud, grateful, better off?
Thinking of my choices in terms of past and future versions of myself illuminates one thing pretty clearly: the way to make my past/future self the most proud at any point in time is usually to do the thing that feels the most scary, uncomfortable, and true in that moment. The thing I want to do, but am scared to do. The thing others would caution me against, but that I know within myself I am capable of.
It’s easier said than done to live this principle, but determining what is the most scary and true to us at any given moment, and then doing it feels like the most we can hope for from ourselves.
It’s worth consistently reflecting on where we are headed to ensure the choices we are making align with us. Without consistent reflection (mind mining!), we will continue to follow a trail of rewards, of external validation, of doing the Right Thing, while time relentlessly passes by.
Youth isn’t forever. It is evaporating slowly, like the steam rising off of hot puddles after a summer rain. This period of little external responsibility (no family, kids, mortgages, etc) and extreme personal agency is dwindling, with each passing tick on our life’s clock.
There is no better time to begin being honest with ourselves than the present. No better time to mine for that nugget of truth within our own mind. No better time to peer into the window inside us to see who really are. Seeking truth takes time, effort, and discipline. It can be painful and disorienting.
But it’s worth it, because what greater success is there than living a life that is true to you?
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson