(Letter to my future self)
You are trying to solve life before living it. Not because you’re arrogant. Because you’re perceptive.
Your mind keeps trying to arrive at a final philosophy that will protect you from:
- regret,
- misalignment,
- wasted years,
- wrong love,
- accidental mediocrity,
- becoming trapped inside a life that slowly deadens you.
So you observe people almost anthropologically:
- “How are they okay with this?”
- “How do they commit so fully?”
- “Don’t they see what they’re giving up?”
- “Don’t they feel the weight of permanence?”
But here is something I suspect you haven’t fully considered:
Deep thinkers often overestimate the importance of choosing correctly and underestimate the importance of becoming someone who can metabolize reality. That’s the real skill.Because no life remains philosophically perfect once lived closely enough.
- Not the army officer’s.
- Not the artist’s.
- Not the wanderer’s.
- Not the deeply-in-love person’s.
- Not the “free” person’s.
Every life, after enough time, becomes ordinary from the inside.Even extraordinary lives contain:
- laundry,
- resentment,
- repetitive mornings,
- loneliness,
- administrative tasks,
- miscommunication,
- dishes in the sink,
- doubt at 2 a.m.
The human tragedy is that we imagine meaning will arrive through the correct architecture of life.But meaning is often generated when you imagination meets reality or vice versa.There’s a story you may like.
A man spends years searching for the perfect city to live in. He studies maps obsessively. Weather patterns. Politics. Cost of living. Architecture. Culture. Crime. Walkability. Dating prospects. Public transport. He reads forums late into the night. Watches videos. Makes spreadsheets.
He believes:“Once I choose the right city, my real life will begin.”
Years pass.
One day, while visiting a small coastal town, he sees an old fisherman repairing a torn net.
The fisherman hums softly while working. The sea is grey. The work is repetitive. Nothing about the moment is extraordinary.And suddenly the man realizes something devastating:The fisherman is not waiting for his life to begin.
That’s the difference.
Some people inhabit life. Others perpetually evaluate it.
You are in danger of becoming the second kind.And intellectual people often mistake perpetual evaluation for depth.
But eventually, analysis can become a way of staying emotionally uncommitted to existence itself.
Because if you never fully choose:
you never fully lose, never fully fail, never fully belong, never fully risk heartbreak, never fully surrender.
You remain observant. Safe. Untethered. But also slightly outside life. The people who move you emotionally — the ones in books like The Midnight Library or What You Are Looking For Is in the Library — are usually not the people who figured life out perfectly.
They are people who finally stopped treating life like a theory.Another thing I want to tell you:Your depth is real. But depth alone is not wisdom.
Some deeply reflective people accidentally become loyal to melancholy because melancholy makes them feel awake, intelligent, singular. They become emotionally attached to longing, possibility, almost-loves, unlived futures.
But life cannot only be contemplated. It also has to be entered.
Imperfectly. Half-informed. Without guarantees.
And maybe this is the most important part:You do not need to find a life where you will never feel trapped.
That life does not exist.You need to build a psyche that remains alive even inside commitment.A person who can still notice beauty:
while paying bills, while staying loyal, while repeating routines, while aging, while grieving, while compromising, while being ordinary sometimes.
That is much rarer than freedom.And one last thought.You are probably searching for a life that feels fully conscious. A life where you never sleepwalk through your own existence.
That’s beautiful.
Just remember: hyper-awareness can illuminate life — but it can also stand between you and it.