My Story
I know how it feels to long for a different life. Until very recently, the product of my everyday decisions was a life I wasn’t proud of (read more about that here). I dreamt of travel, adventure, and excitement, but I had no concrete plan to make that happen. Furthermore, I built a life that didn’t allow me the freedom to achieve those dreams. All my desires lived as far-away concepts of a life I vaguely longed for, but didn’t know how (and was too scared) to achieve.
My everyday decision entrenched me in a life of boredom, normalcy, and mediocrity. I didn’t care about the paychecks and stability my office job offered, but I sunk myself into it anyway. Corporate America promised me that office life guaranteed me a comfortable, stable, albeit slightly boring life with a strong path to wealth.
I was unhappy, but I still believed others who promised me that office life was the best way to live. I believed them, but it sucked to hate my job. I thought about getting a new job, but it was difficult to get excited about any of them, even if it checked all my boxes – higher salaries, cooler companies, and more interesting subject matters.
It took three years of confused discontent before it dawned on me that maybe it’s not just my current job that’s making me unhappy – maybe it’s that each subsequent office job would still be chasing a path I didn’t want anymore. I realized it wasn’t even about perks or companies – every job innately required a compromise that hindered my ability to live the life I wanted.
The problem was that my life was just interesting enough. I had friends with whom I might have dinner once a week, I traveled out of the Midwest occasionally, and I had an apartment that served its purpose well. I made decent money at a job that I didn’t love but also didn’t hate. My life was easy, simple. But that was the issue.
My life wasn’t bad enough to force change, but it also wasn’t good enough that I didn’t desire change. I was in a dreaded limbo where I knew I would need to make a change if I wanted to live the life I dreamed of, but there was never any necessity to make that change. Furthermore, because my life was “just good enough,” it would take a lot of sacrifices to change my life significantly – like abandoning the path I dedicated so many years to (read more here).
The Common Desire for a Better Life
Everyone dreams of a better life. How come so few people get it? Why don’t they do the things they say they want to do? Every day I hear the dream of living in the forest, running away from society, and living in communion with nature (to learn more, read this). Why, then, is it so shocking when someone actually does it? How come we all dream of an unconventional life but never pursue it?
I’ve learned a lot of people don’t take their dreams very seriously. Either that, or they rationalize themselves out of their dreams before even considering whether it’s worth pursuing. They let outside perception dictate their pathway, and instead embrace what’s commonly agreed upon as “correct”, like money, materialism, and comfort.
And, even if your dreams don’t involve money or materialism, and even if you know that fulfillment requires being uncomfortable, you still need to do the scariest thing in professional adult life: risk your stability, comfort, and earnings for happiness. And that’s an insane thing to do.
There’s camaraderie in how everyone agrees to have big dreams but no one has a plan to follow through on them. To the average person, unconventional dreams are like an imaginary friend – something that gives us entertainment and comfort, but we know they’ll never exist.
Toxic Comfort
It’s important to embrace comfort sometimes, but it can quickly become toxic. I used to feed into comfort like an addiction, using it to justify “just one more hour” not improving my life. I needed to feel discomfort toward my life if I wanted to change. I needed to limit my toxic but comfortable distractions to confront my the choices that led me to where I am – and make decisions that would lead me out.
If you’re ever wondering how much you prioritize comfort over improvement, check on your relationship with your phone. Scrolling through social media is comfortable. It’s addicting too. That immediate dopamine release when watching endless hours of other people’s lives is distracting and gets in the way of productive experiences, habits, and work. That immediate gratification is so addicting that most people know how addicting and damaging doomscrolling is, yet they still do not change.
I know this first-hand because I have done it. For months of my life, because I lived alone and didn’t have many friends, I lived on my phone. Week after week, I’d get my screen time report back and realize that I spent upwards of 7 hours a day on my phone. That’s almost half my waking hours, spent scrolling on a small screen. I trudged through that screen addiction with more mental health issues, a warped sense of reality and my own life, and worse feelings about myself and others.
Even as I recognized that my phone was harming me, I also knew that it was filling a hole in my life. It wasn’t a good filler, but it did fill me. It helped me cope with the fact that I didn’t hang out with my friends as much as I wanted to, and it helped me live vicariously through people living the life I wanted.
I lived in a never-ending cycle of being displeased with my life, wanting to change, and then settling for the easiest distraction until the displeasure set back in.
It could be a toxic, or at least boring, relationship, drugs and other numbing agents, or a job that isn’t fulfilling. We fill our time with addictions so we don’t need to face the true areas of fulfillment we’re missing. Distractions are easier to give in to than large risky changes.
But, we are meant to improve our lives, not just push back the nagging feeling of a dream unfulfilled.
Too many of us are convinced that a better life isn’t even possible. We don’t know how to let go of toxicity, either because we don’t know it’s there, or because we think the toxicity is the only way. It’s why we get into bad relationships and stay in them, work jobs we hate and stay at them, and form habits we know aren’t healthy but keep doing them.
Our Habit of Eliminating Good Risk and Embracing Bad Risk
life is about risk and change. Those two words apply to everything: work, love, adventure, and everyday living. We know the saying, “The greater the risk, the greater the reward.” But at the same time, society is built around an assumption that we will value comfort over risk. You’re supposed to get a stable job, a 30-year mortgage on your home, and tie someone down in marriage as soon as possible. Stability is often also required for benefits like health insurance, a good 401k plan, renting an apartment, and borrowing money. Your stability impacts almost everything, even the way people perceive you.
Some of that stability can be nice, but letting it control your life can remove the right type of risk. On some level, it forces you to give up on your dreams because a bi-weekly paycheck is too valuable. Free time, hobbies, passion projects, travel plans, and risky possibilities are all thrown away for a job that, for most people, doesn’t even positively impact your life or others outside of a paycheck.
And that may not apply to everyone. I am sure there are a great many of you who genuinely care about your job and the work that you do for that job. I’m sure making those sacrifices is worthy and right for you. If that’s you, then keep providing valuable work.
For most people, however, I think a change is beneficial.
I’ve learned that just about all comforts, habits, and addictions can turn toxic. Something useful under the right circumstances can be a hindrance under the wrong ones. One that’s easy to relate to is your job. Your job is your opportunity to contribute something positive to the world. Hopefully, it’s something you enjoy spending time doing, that helps other people, and earns you a good living.
But quickly, your job can jail you to a lackluster life. Whether that’s because you feel tied down by it and want to leave, but don’t think you can, or if you don’t want to leave because you’re chasing money, power, or some other external validation.
The risk of discomfort might be keeping you at your job, but we tend to forget the other side of the coin; a risk that, in my opinion, hurts far worse than a drop in earnings: the risk of regret.
By working a job we don’t want, dedicating our time to goals we don’t care for, or spending our time doing things we aren’t passionate about, we risk wasting time. People, specifically young people, tend to forget just how precious time is.
We’re constantly inundated with advice to spend less time in the office, less time obsessed with money, and not obsess about what things we can buy. The issue is that, as young people, we see decades of life ahead of us and we choose to put off our dreams. We pretend that our wanderlust will be satisfied by our future selves, and in that false reassurance we allow our present selves to embrace what’s easy: not changing anything.
If You're Looking for a Sign, This is it
We are the product of our own choices. Before making a drastic change, I wasn’t proud of my day-to-day life because of what I chose to prioritize. Some things are out of our control, yes. But it’s our job to bravely consider solutions to our unique situations – to understand the path you wanted your life to go down, what risks were required of that path, and to take the damn leap.
Without large-scale change, you likely aren’t going to change that much. Comfort is the killer of adventure, and if you are comfortable with working in a cubicle all day, spending your free time on your phone, and only planning trips and adventures when (and if) it fits into your 2-weeks of PTO, then you will never live the life that your wanderlust or “travel bug” is begging you to live.
It’s a simple lesson, but it bears repeating: If you want to live a life you’ve never lived before, then you have to live your life in ways you never have before. It’s easier said than done, but it can be done.
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