It depresses me to think that one day I might look at my life, brush some imaginary dust off my hands, heave an enormous sigh, and announce, “Whelp, this is all there is! There’s nowhere else I can go, so I might as well keep things exactly the way they are!”
It depresses me even more to think that this could happen while I’m still in my thirties.
I hate the idea of slowing down, smothering your self-development, and ceasing to take on new challenges. I also hate the idea of complacently, of being content with what you have, and not dreaming up new goals—that’s where the unconscious desire to stop moving comes from. You can’t go after what you can’t imagine, and when you stop imagining things, you start standing still.
Every single day, for at least a passing moment but sometimes for much longer, I feel really pissed off because there are so many things I want to achieve but haven’t yet. There are things I haven’t written, things I’ve written but haven’t shared with the world, books I haven’t read, things I haven’t learned, places I haven’t seen, ideas I haven’t developed. These goals exist in a realm of possibilities that feels spread out before me: sometimes it’s frustratingly out of reach, but sometimes—to paraphrase the final lines of The Great Gatsby—it feels so close that I can hardly fail to grasp it.
It’s this process of dreaming dreams and going after them that keeps me moving forward, and has propelled me for the past decade or more of my life. When I go after things maybe I’m channeling that part of me that was once twenty-two and just out of college, with no money, a broken-down Oldsmobile with failing brakes, and $647 a month in student loan payments who couldn’t write and didn’t know how to make his way in the world.
I wasn’t happy, then, until I started going after things that I dreamed about. That’s when my life started getting better.
That state of being young, of not having things but wanting them so badly—that’s what it means to be alive. I look around me at all the people I know who don’t seem to want anything at all—or if they do want things, they can either get them without a lot of effort or place them in the realm of impossible dreams that get ignored. I see these people falling into states of malaise, routine, and complacently that aren’t good for them. They lose the thrill of the chase that once made them bright and hopeful and optimistic. They grow old.
There’s also a ridiculous arrogance that comes from thinking there’s nothing about yourself or your situation you can improve on, that you’ve gone as far as you’re going to and can’t go any further. To stop moving means to ignore your own flaws, accept your own weaknesses, and stop dreaming dreams. That depresses me.
It depresses me because it means that the pissed off part of me will never get retribution and will keep being pissed off every day for the rest of my life. That feels like giving up, which is even more depressing.
Continuing to move forward and develop yourself not only materially makes you a better person because of what you’re achieving, it improves the impact you have on the world and gives you a more positive, youthful attitude, which is even more important. Even if I can’t reach any of the things I’m striving for, my desire to keep going after them makes me a better person. And I really want to be a better person.
That’s why I never want to stop improving, moving forward, challenging myself, and exploring. I want that forward momentum to carry me through the rest of my life until the things I’ve achieved have reached unimaginable heights and the destitution of the past feels like a distant memory. For me, that’s what it means to live.
So what, you might ask, will I do when I actually get old?
Maybe, in that distant, unknowable future at the end of my life, a part of me will still feel pissed off because of the things I didn’t achieve. But I hope that part of me is really small.