How to not miss out on life and fritter years away
I am 25 and my life seems quite pleasant. I’ve got people I can communicate with, food to eat and things to do. Baristas from different cities remember my face. Sometimes I end up taking trips or meeting girls. The greenest grass grows on my imagined lawn, all the storms strike other continents. The universe does a great job suggesting that I am doing fine.
However, my mind does not consent to this — it is playing the game of its own. A piece of thinking tissue under the specks of hair does not let me rest. With amazing regularity it keeps bombarding me with tricky questions. The questions that regard my life.
You are 25, mate. Can you remember what happened exactly 2 years ago? No? What about 3 years ago? What about the present you got for your 18th birthday? Still nothing? There’s no doubt you remember your first kiss, even a fish can do that.
For some reason our brain wants to make us reflect on the time we have spent, and maybe even feel sad about it. And it’s doing a great job: we think about constantly eluding minutes, which are the best source for a hell of a monster — depression. It will be for the better should the interim results of your life not comply with your ideals. Just get yourself a drink, the world will understand you and justify your actions.
It is okay not to remember everything
We tend to forget most of the moments of our lives. Why so? The answer lies in the vast amounts of information. Let’s consider a 2-day old baby. The first 24 hours were half of its life. To keep in memory the episodes of one day is very easy, given the fact you have only lived 2 days so far.
However, a 25-year-old adult can’t do the trick, since 1 day gets lost somewhere in the 0,001 % of his or her life. The period of 24 hours is like a much hated Monday that we want to turn our back on as soon as possible. Damn this day.
Hence, it is normal to forget anything. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we are filled with negative emotions. A light feeling of the absurdity of our existence grows into our spurious realization of it, and our mood goes to the dogs. A sunny day is not that sunny any longer. Instead of enjoying a cup of coffee or talking to friends, one feels like staying at home and lamenting over “meaningless years”.
Making our lives better
We can oppose tricks of our minds through actions and special thinking. Let’s take a closer look at these two concepts.
Actions require activity and constant completion of some tasks. Basically, they lead either to tiring the mind so that there are no mental resources left for any other reflections, or to its satiety in events.
For the ease of convenience, let’s split the actions into two categories.
Category 1. The local scale or daily routine.
That is what fills your life from Monday to Friday. Working out in a gym, having regular chats with friends with a glass of wine after work, visiting lectures, etc. The point lies in changing places and environment. Your day will be full of events, you will experience more impressions. It is good fun having a cramped schedule.
Anti-example: you’ve spent the entire day working at the computer, you go home by a regular means of transport according to a regular itinerary, and you eat food from the menu planned in advance. Still, the routine kills. It’s only right that one should feel blue.
Personal experience: in a gym your day will consist of two parts — “before” and “after”. First, I try to perform all my tasks so that I can lift the bar with a clear conscience. I leave my cell phone in a changing room before working out, so as not to mix two different pastimes. Divide and rule.
Category 2. The global scale and actions-exceptions.
If you are lucky, this is something that happens several times a year. Trips are a touchstone of such actions. The core idea here is about changing locations in a more radical manner, though.
Why does everyone like travelling? Trips to a foreign country are an improved version of life. Normally people don’t work when travelling. They spend more money and take strolls the entire day. Nobody would hit upon the idea of feeling bored or thinking negative.
Here as well one has to remember being cautious, since mundane things and everything that goes with them are a mere step away. In order to reach success, avoid encountering familiar things. Focus on a new experience.
Anti-example: checking-in at a chain hotel, dropping by Starbucks or drinking yet another big latte — doing pretty much the same things you do in your home town.
Personal experience: last March I visited Barcelona. I stuck to a schedule completely different from that I had been keeping to before. I was hunting for emotions. I will always remember the burger I ate at 1 a.m. standing in front of La Sagrada Familia and a one-minute dive I took in the scalding hot Mediterranean Sea. I was also planning to drink some cappuccino over the clouds while flying back home. This intention of mine foundered, though.
By the way: you don’t necessarily need to gain some exceptionally nice experience to get impressed. Somebody stole my iPhone in the Spanish subway. Two pals played it with great stealth: one of them dropped some coins right in front of me, bending over to gather them and at the same time giving me a slight nudge with his bottom. The other one wasted no time picking my phone from the inside pocket of my jeans jacket. The whole performance might have looked awkward to onlookers, but the guys achieved their goal.
After a few seconds I understood I had been mugged. I sounded the alarm. There was a happy end: one of the pickpockets pretended to stoop down and pick up my red iPhone 8 from the floor (in fact he pulled it out of my sleeve) and gave it back to me. The whole performance lasted about 20 seconds, but these were some toxic 20 seconds. As a result, these were my strongest emotions after the trip.
Whenever I met someone after the trip, the exact same dialogue occurred:
— How was your trip to Barcelona?
— Cool. Oh, and someone snatched my phone.
Thinking outside the box
And now let’s get back to thinking. The importance of this concept was explained to me by Mikhail, a friend of mine, whose family provided me with a shelter during my visit to Spain. They are quite well-off, so it was all the more interesting to listen to their stories and to experience their way of life.
Misha is a stickler for a motto “we live only once”. Childish as it may sound, yet a successful adult is very much able to convince you of the contrary. It is thanks to this principle that Mikhail bought his second car — a sports convertible roadster. He first had doubts about going for it, but then he says that in the end it was one of the best decisions he ever took in his life.
Broad thinking enables one to do big deeds regularly.
The same goes for any trifle. You want to uncork a bottle of wine or enjoy a piece of Jamón? Do it now, don’t wait for a Saturday evening. You came to like some brand shoes whose price exceed the capacity of your budget? Buy them now, you might never get another chance to do that. Your friends invite you to take a kickboxing course? Why not. The main thing is to be constantly looking for new emotions and sources of joy. Your life then will go on full speed ahead.
Anti-example: visiting another country and saving 30 euros on a dinner in a fancy place with gorgeous view and music. This decision is motivated by financial literacy. However, this money will sooner or later be spent on coffee, transfer or any other trinket in your home country.
Personal experience: a warm night at an oyster bar Gouthier, Barcelona. We already ate 15 oysters and drank some wine. My bill would come out at quite a sum. I am not hungry any more. My sense of reason tells me to pay the bill and get the hell out of the place. Misha has something else in mind — he finds in the menu Belon oysters. He says he read about them on the internet. They cost more than anything else listed in the menu, but who gives a damn? We live only once!
“Belon”, por favor.
Take more
How to not miss out on life? Spend money, don’t stay too long at one place, talk to people and eat whatever you want. Party hard while travelling. When in a home town, turn your stay into a journey. Fill your every second with events and forget about sadness. You simply won’t have time for that. It’s worth it.
