There is this lanky, weightless demon that lives somewhere in the back of my head, asking me to make the most out of every moment. To make all my tiny actions worth being proud of in the future. And maybe, just maybe, you have that demon too. It’ll start poking you when you’re sitting with a friend, and slowly, the conversation dies out. It’ll ask you to not stretch the silence, to fill it to the brink with anything meaningless and random because you’re wasting time that could potentially be such fun and awesome memories to look back on. When you are lying on your bed, staring at the ceiling, cooking up fake scenarios, the demon will laugh at you for being mundane and boring. And when you’re drinking coffee by yourself at a cafe, the demon will undoubtedly degrade you. “This is not fun. You are wasting your time again. Go do something productive or adventurous or crazy. Something that you’ll remember in 10 years”.Â
But what I’ve come to realize is that life is pretty boring, pretty mundane. Learning to embrace it with whimsy and grace is a wonderful way of looking at life. One day, we’re going to be working nine-to-fives and filling insurance forms. The spontaneous, adventurous montage that we dream of is not the most probable future sometimes. We will be bouncing between sleep debt, overdue deadlines, and a hundred decisions about what to cook, eat, buy, or do next. So, to stop all sorts of doing for a second and to sit by yourself for a moment is not being lazy or dreary. Memories are not projects. And what this demon that forces us to make memories out of everything actually does is steal us away into how we will think about this moment in the future, instead of actually being present and grounded in the moment. The more the demon idealizes how a day, a party, a hangout should play out, the less content you’ll feel because we can never satisfy idealized plans. If anything goes wrong, it will ruin our day, or even our week.
Joy cannot always be planned. It cannot be engineered. You have to stop forcing yourself to capture every moment into a Pinterest board. We are often told that “You are young. These are the best years of your life”. But that is basically a myth that pressures you into saying yes to everything there is: a late-night event when you’ve got work early the next morning or activities that leave you feeling drained instead of content. That need not always be the case. You can have time for nothing, for peeling oranges in the living room, for rewatching that favorite sitcom and for sleeping on a loved one’s shoulder during a long journey. A holiday does not have to be a fully-planned day. Constantly optimizing our money, space, and time can leave us feeling like we’re always falling behind. And it is always the small, unscripted, day-to-day moments, like picking seashells on the beach or simply walking together that stay with you the longest. Because memories are not to be made, they are to be lived.