50 Ways Adulting Sucks (And Why You Should Enjoy Your Youth While It Lasts)

46. That I needed to learn to think a few years ahead all the time. Not like, have a Five Year Plan, but just getting my head around how long it takes to make changes that stick, and how that happens more easily if I’m in the habit of thinking, what do I hope to be doing in 2022?

It’s harder to get spun up in useless daily shit if somewhere in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Pretty soon this particular thing I’m thrashing over will not matter to me at all.” Which almost ALWAYS turns out to be true.

I was in a class once where the theme was, “if you’re not working on your own plans, you’re working on somebody else’s.” We had to do this exercise where we imagined a future version of ourselves in excruciating detail. What was the room like where we woke up. Who was with us, if anyone. What clothes did we put on. Did we go to a job? How did we get there? What did we do there? Etc, etc.

It was kind of eye-opening, in the sense that it made me realize this imaginary future me wasn’t going to just spring whole and fully formed out of a date on the calendar. It was an exercise in values, really.

Worth doing thirty five years ago, and still worth doing now that I’m looking at how to spend the last 20 or so that are (if I’m lucky) still ahead.