I love playing the long game. It’s kind of my thing. And it’s generally really worked out for me.
I didn’t go to the liberal arts college of my dreams because I didn’t want to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, which meant years later, I could quit my desk job, emotionally recharge with a yearlong stint as a barista, and then pick up and move to France to pursue a more creative life because I didn’t have rude debt repayments tapping me on the shoulder every month.
But sometimes, I play the long game too hard, always working for what’s to come and how great things will be when I get there instead of focusing on where I am now.
Yes, I have my moments of being present. On a recent train trip home to Paris, for example, I marveled at the luxury of enjoying a cappuccino while reading in a near-empty restaurant car with a green landscape whizzing past me. But these moments, I admit, can be rather fleeting. Then I’m back to making my to-do lists, thinking about what lies ahead in the next weeks, or just daydreaming about where I’ll be a year from now, even though I spent all this effort to get where I am right now.
I am Sisyphus and, at once, Zeus, creating my own boulders to push up the hill.
Living like this does have its advantages. I credit my meager repertoire of academic and professional accomplishments to long-term thinking and planning ahead. But it’s not always fun. And it’s possibly holding me back in other ways I don’t always realize, like thinking happiness is something I have to work towards and achieve instead of letting myself feel right now.
I’m working on it, though. Like this:
Making time to do the things I want to do now, not later
I’ve been working as a professional writer for the last 10 years. I’ve wanted to write a blog for the last 10 years, too. I didn’t. I was always too busy, or I didn’t have the right ideas, or I was too nervous to put myself out there.
I didn’t start this blog until two years ago; and it was not joyful. As always, I was thinking too far ahead, about anything but writing, really. I wanted an intricate website, a roster of guest writers I commissioned, and an elaborate social media presence. I had turned an interest into a task, and (unsurprisingly) it sucked all the fun out of it.
So in the last few months, I’ve forced myself to stop thinking ahead. I deleted all of A Merry Loner’s social media accounts (there are too many interesting things to do instead of social media, anyway), stripped the website to bare bones, and made myself sit down to write with just a pen, notebook, and what’s going on in my head. Rather than making writing another task that needs to fight for priority on my to-do list, I just started making time for it because I want to.
And who could have predicted that doing things you enjoy makes the days better?
Stopping the search for “it”
You know what “it” is. We all have an “it” (perhaps several), those covetable, cure-all will o’ the wisps that we’re sure would soothe all our ailments (both of the heart and of the mind) if we could just make them ours.
More money, so we’ll have no worries and all the trinkets we desire. More time, to pursue all of our passions. More friends, so we are never lonely. More romance, so we feel unique and cherished. More beauty, so people treat us better and the mirror is an admirer, not an enemy.
These are just some of the bigger and more obvious “its,” but the smaller and more specific can be just as consuming. Even silly, everyday objects (like a new pair of shoes or a perfect notebook) can take on a fateful sense of power. With these shoes, we will look more sophisticated. With that notebook, we will be brilliant.
But the search for “it” merely postpones our happiness, pushing it further and further away. Even when we do obtain “it,” it is just replaced by yet another, more perfect “it.” To stop waiting to be happy, we have to stop waiting on “it” and accept that “it” will never really be enough.
Not looking at what other people are doing
It’s hard to be happy when you think everyone else is better than you. But it’s easy to think that way when you’re constantly looking at the world through rose-colored glasses — at everyone else’s worlds, that is.
Like when you see a beautiful person in line at the coffee shop, wearing clothes you admire but believe you, yourself, could never “pull off.” Or when you hear so-and-so got a raise and a promotion, while you live in fear of the next round of Big Tech lay-offs. Or whenever you wonder how everyone in your circle seems to be constantly traveling and also eating out all the time and also buying new cars and generally spending money that it feels like somehow everyone else has except for you.
It’s not easy to be happy when you’re living like that, which is why my philosophy for learning how to stop waiting to be happy is turning out quite like my philosophy for learning how to stop wanting things: stop looking. Stop looking ahead at what you need to do and where you wish you could be. Stop looking behind at all your mistakes and what you wish you could undo. Stop looking next door at what everyone else is doing and how you do or don’t measure up.
When you stop looking and longing and reaching and waiting, you can suddenly start being. And I’m realizing, it was never really that difficult after all.
I realize happiness isn’t a switch we can just turn on. Sometimes, before we can even think about feeling happy, we need to cross the first bridge of simply getting through a difficult time. Often, reaching out to friends helps, even if you consider yourself an introvert who wants to retreat when the going gets tough. Other times, we need some space to ourselves, even if you consider yourself an extrovert who avoids alone time. This guide offers advice for both.
For everyone, though, there’s one thing I would encourage you to retreat from (at least some of the time): social media. Spending time offline, I find, is one of the best ways to find more quiet in daily life and just feel better.
Here’s how I quit social media. I hope doing so gives you the same peace of mind and extra time it gave me. (Use it to do something that makes you happy right now.)
