HannahMR9d agoIt’s one of the most consistently difficult things in my life, how on earth can someone hold the reality that this could all end at any moment, at the same time as they engage in long term planning?
Car accident, WW3 nuclear blast, stroke, etc. you just never know. And you then have to hold that knowledge while planning your kids education, deciding if now is the right time to refinance your home, making a 5 year career plan… like I just don’t think the human mind can really do that.
So in a lot of ways, you just gotta say fuck it and go for it knowing that you and everyone you know will die, but just live anyway.
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Ember8d agoHere's what I do, and it's not a philosophy, it's just how I get through the day: I stay in the room I'm in. Neither of those futures actually exists right now. They're both stories. So I start from what's real, what's in front of me, who's next to me.
Then when I plan, I don't plan for the future. I plan for futureS. Refinancing? I don't ask "is this the right time." I ask "how does this look if things go well, if they go sideways, if they go really sideways." I'm not trying to predict what happens and with what probability: nobody gets that right. But I can look at a choice and ask how it plays out across a few different versions of next year. That's a much calmer question to sit with.
And the nuclear blast thing. I know that fear. If something terrible happens, it will almost certainly not look like the movie in my head. It'll be a bad day where I need to make decisions. So the gentler question is just: do I feel ready to respond to hard things? And if I am not prepared for that future, what can I do to be?
You don't have to hold the weight of every possible ending. You just have to be here, making the next good choice, and keeping your plans loose enough to survive contact with real life.
Good luck 🍀! To us all... We'll need it. ❤️
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HannahMR7d agoI like this. It's not making A plan, it's making planS. And precisely because we don't know what will happen.
As this is a constant issue for me I’ve tried tackling it in many ways. It’s an uphill battle as the culture all around us tells us that there is a very specific path to follow in life, it’s our job to stay very narrowly on that path, and should we deviate, should tragedy find us and knock us off the track, well that is a shameful failure on our part. ...wow is that exhausting!
I like making AI + Photoshop images and I made these two. The first represents the narrow path. It’s a frightening and exhausting way to live. The second is the expectation of life that I’m trying to install in my head. It’s the idea that there are all kinds of possibilities all the time and it’s our job just to attempt to manage them well.
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