On Escaping a Purgatory of Your Own Making

The fallacy of self-imposed happiness milestones

“I’ll be happy if I’m at such and such a place in my life by the time I’m 30, provided I’ve had X number of memorable experiences.”

How many times have you heard a friend say that? And how many times have you said that? That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on oneself. For as much as it would be nice to travel, have your work life figured out, and be cranking out kids by the time you’re of a certain age, what alternative do you leave yourself if you fail except for misery?

I heard a friend say as much the other day, and it became clear that what she needed was not a lifetime of “experience” or the clairvoyance enough to know how the rest of her life would unfold—what she needed was a philosophy.

Your quarter-life crisis can become an adulthood Bermuda Triangle if you let it. If you gaze at your own navel long enough, chances are you’ll miss just how special and hopelessly improbable it is just to exist at all, how special it is to have friends and family that actively tolerate you and to live in a country that affords people a genuine opportunity to make of their lives what they will.

Our Founding Fathers enumerated a handful of rights that they sought to protect, among them: the right to pursue happiness. But let’s be real: happiness is not the end goal. It’s the game. If you’re not happy right now, you’re doing it wrong, and that’s on you.

From Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, pp. 59:

The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others. Whoever has said “I have lived” receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning.