You Keep Waiting For Your "Real" Life To Begin

[00:00:01]There is a cheese grater in my kitchen drawer that I haven't used in around probably four years, which is a strange thing to be attached to. I'm aware.

[00:00:14]Um, it's not even a nice one. It but it's in the good drawer.

[00:00:20]Uh, this is the drawer that's reserved apparently for tools that um mean something.

[00:00:29]And every so often I open that drawer and I see it sitting there and I think, "Yeah, soon soon I'll be a person who grates his own cheese again."

[00:00:44]Um, and I I just I just have to get past this crazy busy season or whatever it is. And once things calm down, I'll get back to really cooking um the real way with fresh parmesan and a quality grater instead of whatever pre-shredded bag of orange regret that I've been buying.

[00:01:14]Except of course things never really calm down.

[00:01:19]They just uh change shape I suppose.

[00:01:24]And now opening that drawer feels like I'm visiting a relative that I've been uh avoiding at Thanksgiving for going on half a decade.

[00:01:39]And um no, I suppose this isn't really about a cheese grater.

[00:01:46]I think almost everyone has one of these things. Um, maybe it's that degree that you were going to finish or it's that smaller pair of jeans that uh that you keep around like a like a hostage waiting for a ransom that you stopped negotiating years ago.

[00:02:19]Um, you know, there's this a whole other life that people are waiting to start, right? I mean, so many of us live like this.

[00:02:36]This is the so-called real life in the future.

[00:02:41]You know, that's that's the version of life that begins the second that the current situation uh whatever garbage fire it happens to be this year finally resolves.

[00:02:58]But deep down, you know, the current situation's never going to resolve. It's just going to get replaced by some different situation with a similar job title, right?

[00:03:12]So, nonetheless, you keep waiting and you keep waiting politely and indefinitely.

[00:03:22]Um, and all the while you're standing in in this line that never actually moves where occasionally you're handed a little update to the um, standing still.

[00:03:44]Well, you're handed you're handed a little update. of the standing still feels like um it's leading somewhere.

[00:03:58]So, all right. Um here's the thing about that statement.

[00:04:04]Um once things calm down, it's never actually a lie when you say it. But that's what makes it so effective, right?

[00:04:19]Um, it's it's uh it's once the move is done, uh, once the kids are a little older, you know, once I get that job, um, I don't know, once I'm out of debt, once I get out of jail, uh, every single one of those things is a real legitimate, you know, fully justified reason to put something off for a while.

[00:04:54]But the problem, it isn't any individual reason.

[00:05:00]The problem is that reasons, they don't neatly queue up and wait their turn politely.

[00:05:10]They just keep arriving.

[00:05:13]um one replacing the last one before you know before you've even noticed uh that the handoff happened. And uh sometimes of course they they just keep piling on.

[00:05:34]And I think people imagine this waiting like it's um like it's just a phase or something like it like it's something with an exit because again you're just in some crazy busy season and uh but then you get through it. Uh uh and then the real life starts.

[00:06:01]the one where you grate your own cheese and and you know, you call your mother back and um you finally write the thing or do the thing or or whatever it is.

[00:06:12]But unfortunately, it doesn't really work like a season because a season well well a season ends due to the earth's tilt.

[00:06:30]um as it orbits the sun, right?

[00:06:35]But this doesn't have anything moving it.

[00:06:45]There's no I guess there's no mechanism that's forcing the calm to actually arrive.

[00:06:53]You just have this feeling that you're owed one eventually, like you've, you know, the way that you're owed a seat on a crowded train because you've been standing for a while.

[00:07:04]So, what actually happens is the waiting becomes the baseline.

[00:07:13]Um, it's not just a phase that you're in.

[00:07:17]It's the actual It's like the actual operating system that's underneath everything else.

[00:07:23]And sometimes I think about this in it in its most extreme version. Um, for example, like somebody very old and very sick who's finally free of every single obligation that uh had been the official excuse for 40 or 50 years or whatever.

[00:07:55]So, no job, no kids needing rides anywhere, no moves or climbing some corporate ladder or digging themselves out of debt. just there's just total complete um unbothered bandwidth, which is uh generally speaking not exactly the best moment to finally start living your life.

[00:08:34]It seems that there's a bit of um schedule scheduling issue there. But that is the world that we live in I suppose.

[00:08:46]So if the waiting isn't actually just a phase, um I guess the obvious next question would be, well then what the hell is it?

[00:09:02]And why does the brain seem so stubbornly committed to it?

[00:09:10]Well, as it turns out, uh there's actually a rather clarifying neurological explanation for why this keeps happening, though it is slightly insulting.

[00:09:25]Um, so there's a psychologist named Hal Hersshfield who ran a series of brain imaging studies where he asked people to think about themselves in the future like 10 or 20 years in the future.

[00:09:44]And so what he found was that the brain activity produced by thinking about the future version of you, it looks almost identical to the brain activity produced by thinking about a completely different person.

[00:10:04]Um, so not a future version of yourself, a total stranger, which means that when you make a decision that future you is going to have to deal with, um, such as, I don't know, the debt or the the health thing or whatever it is that you're not addressing.

[00:10:30]Your brain is essentially making that decision on behalf of someone it has no actual relationship with.

[00:10:44]So you're not stalling for yourself really. You're stalling on behalf of a stranger and then you're handing them the bill.

[00:11:01]future you is uh basically the most overworked and worst treated employee in your entire operation and who gets that person gets assigned all the the difficult stuff.

[00:11:15]Uh so future you never gets a raise, never gets thanked, has no recourse because well by the time they show up the statute of limitations for complaining about it has um that's apparently expired.

[00:11:38]And I think that this explains something about why your so-called real life keeps not starting because starting requires current you to make sacrifices for for future you. Right? So you have to do the uncomfortable thing now in exchange for something that hopefully pays off later.

[00:12:09]Uh but if the brain doesn't really register future you as fully you if that person registers somewhere between um like acquaint an acquaintance or minor inconvenience then the motivation to do anything on their behalf is going to be at best inconsistent.

[00:12:38]And um it's not really laziness.

[00:12:42]It's just that the person who benefits from starting is someone that your nervous system doesn't fully recognize yet anyway.

[00:12:58]And the person who bears the cost of starting is right here holding well you guessed it the cheese graater very much present but not you know they're not especially enthusiastic about doing hard things for some stranger.

[00:13:26]There is a philosopher by the name of Saurin Kirkagard who wrote about something that I think applies here pretty well.

[00:13:38]And well, I think it should be mentioned that um Kierard is one of those thinkers with particularly sharp ideas that are written in pros.

[00:13:52]That's um well, let's just say that it's a commitment.

[00:13:56]So, we're going to take the useful part and try to leave the 19th century Danish theological architecture where it belongs.

[00:14:07]Um, Kerkard wrote a book called either or where he described what he called the aesthetic stage of life.

[00:14:22]And so the basic idea here is this is a life that's organized around keeping your options open.

[00:14:34]It's organized around novelty, uh, distraction, um, you know, the next interesting thing, whatever that might be. It It's pretty much the avoidance of any commitment that's um, specific enough to actually close a door.

[00:15:00]But you know this this aesthetic person, it's not that they're unhappy.

[00:15:11]They're just in this state of being perpetually between things. Um they're always about to begin and they never they're never actually quite beginning.

[00:15:29]and uh Kirkard's observation which I find a little uncomfortable in the way that accurate things tend to be um I is that this isn't actually this being in this state isn't actually freedom or freeing I guess it's actually a kind of despair that doesn't announce itself is despair because it doesn't look melodramatic or something. It looks like flexibility and it it basically it looks like someone who just hasn't found the right thing yet, which when you think about it is is a pretty convincing disguise.

[00:16:27]So, you could look at it like it's despair that's wearing a keeping my options open tote bag.

[00:16:38]Um, telling everyone it's just waiting for the right opportunity because well, here's the thing about keeping your options open indefinitely.

[00:16:54]At some point it stops being a strategy and it just starts being your life.

[00:17:04]And it's the kind of life where nothing is ever really chosen or started and nothing is ever quite lost either because well you never committed to it in the first place.

[00:17:25]So nothing's really happening.

[00:17:29]And you know, you you can't grieve the path that's not taken if you're technically still standing at the fork in the road, right?

[00:17:40]Which you feel safe.

[00:17:43]And I I'd argue it's its own kind of loss because it's the loss of a life that actually happened traded for the comfort of one that theoretically still could happen.

[00:18:04]And Kirkagard would say that the waiting it isn't neutral because it has a cost.

[00:18:16]It just sends the invoice to um you in the future.

[00:18:28]All right. So I want to get I guess briefly concrete here uh because I think the waiting this waiting situation it feels abstract until you attach something to it with an actual finite you know shrinking number attached to it. Um Oliver Burkeman who I've mentioned many times before.

[00:18:57]So, he wrote a book, he wrote about this sort of thing in his book, uh, 4,000 weeks. Um, and the title of that book, by the way, well, I guess it it refers to the, um, that that's the rough number of um, weeks in a human life of about 80 years, which might sound like a lot, right?

[00:19:27]until you do the math on how many of these weeks you've actually already spent, which I have done. Uh, and then it sounds considerably less like a lot.

[00:19:46]And then you put the book down and you stare at the wall for a while, which is um I guess I think that's the intended response.

[00:19:57]because it's fairly alarming.

[00:20:02]Um, and it turns out that uh you know that that that someday account it's not infinite or or more accurately I guess I should say it's not nearly as substantial as you thought it was.

[00:20:22]Every week that's added to um the waiting list is a week that's subtracted from the only life that was ever actually going to happen.

[00:20:40]Unfortunately, there's no supplementary life running in the background accumulating interest while you wait for conditions to improve.

[00:20:50]There's just this one.

[00:20:56]And that's the one that's happening right now while you're standing in the kitchen thinking about uh grating cheese.

[00:21:06]And I think people know this, but they only know it in a way where it's I guess it's like sitting in the background in in some as like a lowgrade unease that occasionally surfaces at 3 in the morning. Um, and then gets suppressed again by the time you wake up.

[00:21:36]because, you know, there's well, there's bills to pay and work to do and emails and blah blah blah and so forth.

[00:21:45]And I've noticed that there's a certain type of absurdity to the retirement version of this situation.

[00:21:59]uh you know that's that that's there's this idea that of of carefully saving up free time for later hopefully if you make it there.

[00:22:16]So you're basically banking decades of deferred living against a future window of of availability.

[00:22:27]Like it's some kind of um loyalty rewards program.

[00:22:35]And if you're fortunate enough or I guess lucky enough to accumulate enough points, then you eventually get to cash them in for the real life ideally.

[00:22:52]Except the reality is the the redemption window uh has terms and conditions that nobody reads, of course.

[00:23:04]and the points expire and the um you know the catalog gets smaller.

[00:23:12]And so by the time that you've saved up enough points, the things that you were saving for have occasionally stopped being available at that price, which is one of the um this is one of the less charming surprises um that the universe has in store.

[00:23:42]So, all right. Here here's where I'm going to try to not turn this into an insufferable uh motivational speech or something because um that's toxic positivity territory. And if you've watched enough of my videos, you already know my feelings about that.

[00:24:07]And so the reason the motivational speech doesn't usually work, I don't think that's I don't think that the advice is wrong necessarily so much as they all pretty much share the same basic assumption.

[00:24:27]um that starting requires the right conditions and the right mindset, you know, just the right moment of clarity.

[00:24:41]And that once you have those things all lined up, the starting will feel natural and um vaguely cinematic or something.

[00:24:58]But it doesn't.

[00:25:02]It feels shitty.

[00:25:06]You know, starting from a stopped position on something that matters under conditions that aren't exactly ideal, which is of course every condition that's ever existed.

[00:25:21]It feels like trying to start a car that's been sitting in a field for four years.

[00:25:30]You're going to need more than one attempt. And things are probably going to make weird sounds that you weren't expecting.

[00:25:38]And uh there's a real possibility that the first few miles are going to be pretty ugly.

[00:25:50]Annie Dillard wrote something that stayed in the back of my mind.

[00:25:56]How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

[00:26:03]Which sounds simple enough to put on a mug, I guess. But I think the implication of that is actually fairly brutal because there's no real life waiting in a separate room while you finish up with this one.

[00:26:28]This has been it the entire time um operating as the rehearsal without anyone clarifying that the rehearsal and the concert were actually in fact the same event.

[00:26:47]And I think the only honest version of starting it isn't about finding some right moment.

[00:26:58]It's it's being willing to start badly in the wrong conditions.

[00:27:05]um without the dignity of you know some clean beginning.

[00:27:17]I think you you got you got to be okay with doing the thing in the form that's actually available rather than waiting for the form that you thought it was supposed to arrive in.

[00:27:35]I mean, the cheese grater isn't going to use itself, unfortunately, even if it's some high-end tech version.

[00:27:46]Okay.

[00:27:48]Um, I know I keep coming back to the stupid cheese grater.

[00:27:55]Not that it's a profound object or anything. I mean, it's a cheese grater.

[00:28:00]It's about as profound as a cheese grater, which is to say it's not very profound, obviously. But I think the reason that this this thing has stuck with me is uh is that it's such a completely I don't know an an undramatic or I guess like an antilimactic version of the same thing that everyone's carrying around in in some form or another because I think I think the big version of this the life you kept scheduling for later that feels too heavy to to look at most of the time. It's it's got too much weight attached to it.

[00:28:54]It's got too much of what it would mean to actually reckon with it.

[00:29:03]But the cheese grater, it's that's small enough to um to be honest about. Uh you know, it's just an object in a drawer that I've been saving for a version of myself that just keeps not showing up.

[00:29:25]And at some point, a different question that's harder to dismiss at 3:00 a.m.

[00:29:36]is going to sit down across from you and it's going to wait which is uh was that version ever real or was it always just the story that I told myself to make the current version feel temporary?

[00:30:03]Because here's here's what I think is actually true that I find both clarifying and somewhat annoying in roughly equal measure.

[00:30:14]There is no socalled real life waiting to begin.

[00:30:24]There's just this one. This is the one that's been happening the whole time that you were in the waiting room.

[00:30:32]convinced that the actual appointment was still coming and the waiting is in neutral. as as Kigerard would remind us and uh the weeks are actually finite in a way that's I guess easy to know but hard to feel as well as Burkeman spent 400 pages uh pointing out and also the uh future future you that that Hersshfield was talking about, that's someone your brain has been treating like a stranger this this uh this whole time.

[00:31:24]Unfortunately, none of this adds up to a nice clean instruction of some kind. And um also, unfortunately, I don't have one either.

[00:31:38]But I do think that there's something worth actually doing with the cheese grater. And it's not because grating cheese is uh you know lifechanging.

[00:31:49]It's because leaving it in the drawer for another four years or whatever while telling yourself that counts as saving it for something.

[00:32:09]That's a choice, too.

[00:32:12]It just doesn't really um feel like one.

[00:32:18]And on some level I think you already know that.

[00:32:28]And uh all right that is quite enough about cheese graders for today. Um, does remind me of actually another video I made I think last year sometime about maybe almost a year ago that started off with me talking about cheese grers and it was a video on minimalism. But anyway, I digress.

[00:32:58]As always, thanks so much for listening.