Stop Waiting for Life to Begin

Stop Waiting for Life to Begin

On growing up, chasing a future that always seems better, and forgetting that we're already living.

hasif 💌

Oct 25, 2026

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I think I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t tell you exactly what that something is, which makes the whole thing even more irritating, but there’s always been this quiet expectation that eventually I’ll reach a point where everything feels different. Life will feel more settled, I’ll understand myself a little better, and the things that bother me now will become stories I tell people over dinner. I’ll look back at my current life and understand why I had to go through all of it. For now, though, I’m supposed to keep going, keep improving, keep getting somewhere. Somewhere being a place I have never actually seen.

And I’m tired of it. I’m tired of treating my own life like a waiting room for an appointment that nobody has scheduled. Every time I get through something, I find another thing to get through, and somehow I’ve convinced myself that this is progress. I finish one difficult chapter and immediately start worrying about the next one, as though happiness is a reward for completing the entire syllabus of being alive. I barely give myself time to feel relieved before I’m searching for another problem to solve. At this point, I could probably receive the best news of my life and spend the evening worrying about what might happen afterwards.

Growing up has been a particularly strange experience because adulthood looks so much more certain from a distance than it feels when you’re actually living it. When I was younger, I assumed adults had some internal understanding of life that I would eventually develop, some point at which the confusion would settle and I’d finally understand how everything was supposed to work. They seemed so certain about everything, even when they were making terrible decisions, and I took that certainty as evidence that they knew something I didn’t. Now I’m older, and the adults around me are still figuring things out, except they have bills to pay and people depending on them. I have a feeling we’re all making it up to some extent, and I find that both comforting and deeply annoying.

The problem is that I keep waiting to become someone who has his life together. I have this picture in my head of what my life is supposed to look like once I finally figure things out, and somehow the person I am right now never quite measures up to it. I keep thinking I’ll feel better when I’m more certain about my future, when I stop second-guessing every decision, when I can finally look at my life and feel like I’m doing something right. Until then, everything feels like a work in progress, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated with the idea that I have to spend so much of my life working towards a point where I can finally relax and enjoy it. I’m already living my life, so why does it keep feeling like I’m waiting for it to start?

A few days ago, one of my subscriber,

Maxim

, sent me an essay titled

The Permission to Live

. Reading it made me think about how much time we spend trying to understand life, as though there’s some answer we’re supposed to arrive at eventually. I found myself thinking about the way we imagine adulthood, the expectations we carry into it, and how strange it is to realise that getting older doesn’t necessarily make any of it clearer. I wanted to share their essay here in full, because I think it’s worth reading in their own words before I get into everything it made me think about.

MAXIM’S SUBSCRIBER ESSAY:

That was the evening I met S., my friend’s father. He was a tall man in his early fifties who moved quickly and spoke intensely, full of energy and adventurous spirit. A type of person who could be described as an “extraverted extravert”, if one had to put a label on him. When I texted him that I was in town and wanted to meet, he replied: “I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to all the best places”. I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded exciting.

In the evening, we went to a touristy place by the coast. It was a posh restaurant, with well-dressed waiters, a fancy interior, a large bar full of expensive drinks. The kind of place people go to be seen, more than anything else. So I assumed that would be the night. Most of the time, if I go out, I spend the whole evening at the same place or at least close to it. However, S. had other plans. After we ate and had a quick beer, he said it was time to go to the next place, something completely opposite, a place where the locals go. It felt like he was saying: “Okay, you’ve seen this side of things, now it’s time to see something real.”

We got into a car and quickly drove out of the city. After about half an hour, we arrived in a small, normal-looking village. There was nothing special about it except the story behind the place. On the way, S. gave me a quick overview of the island’s history, leading up to today’s situation. The village was located in the buffer zone, under United Nations control — not under the jurisdiction of either side of the conflict — which, at least the way S. told it, made it a hub for “interesting” people. It’s fascinating how context changes the perception of an

otherwise ordinary place — suddenly the streets looked alive, the houses full of history.

As we entered the bar, a bald guy in a bandana spotted S. and immediately approached to greet us. He was the owner of the place, one of the “interesting” people I’d mentioned earlier. He spoke in a very low, hoarse voice, like the main character from an 80s New York gang movie. The bar itself was filled with people talking passionately, drinking. The crowd was a mix of different cultures, and the place didn’t feel put together — it felt like it grew that way, like it had an identity. S. called out a waitress he knew. She gave us a table and some drinks, “as usual”.

We spent the rest of the evening talking about life, religion, children, his experiences when he was my age, and, of course, crazy youth stories. This was one of the most wholesome talks in a while. Even though he was twice my age, the conversation didn’t feel uneven. He didn’t speak like he had all the answers or like he was there to teach me – more like: “I’m the same as you, I’ve just been around longer”.

After talking to S. all evening, something I’d been thinking about for a while became clear: I’ll never figure life out, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it. When I was younger, it seemed that older people understood life, as if there was a threshold that you pass, and things somehow made sense. I think they never do. You just keep living, trying things out, seeing what happens, and if you’re lucky enough, enjoying it. I think I can see it in some older people — the disappointment after a lifelong search for clarity that never came. It shows in their faces. They seem to have accepted that they would never find it, whatever

it

means. It’s hard to comprehend that there is nothing more beyond what we have now. It just can’t be the case that this dullness, in the most positive sense of this word, is all there is to life, right? When I say “life”, I am talking about the “feeling of life” as a whole — the aggregate of all the external signals projected onto the internal state, trying to make sense of uncertainty, trying to understand how things work. I think that when we

try to understand life, we miss something simple: there’s nothing to understand. Life is just a sequence of moments that appear and vanish into nothingness, leaving a distorted representation we call memory.

It might sound like I’m talking about mindfulness, being present, living in the moment, and all that stuff. That’s not quite what I mean. Living in the moment assumes there is no past or future, that only the present can be experienced. These things are easy to say and hard to do. The future

still exists, at least as an idea in our minds. This is what makes it difficult to live fully in the present in daily life – we still need to function and navigate the complexity of today, which requires at least some estimation of the future. The world is full of uncertainty, and our brains are wired to model the possible outcomes. We have this ability to imagine how we might experience future moments, and anticipation is what moves us forward.

Often, when we think about the future, our experience of how we would feel in a specific future moment is skewed towards “better”. That expectation keeps us moving. But once you realize that the future won’t feel fundamentally different from now, you can

give yourself permission to live

. Not because the present is all there is, but because imagining a future moment and working backward from it reveals there’s nowhere else to arrive at. So you can just live.

That’s how S. seemed to approach things. His face didn’t carry the kind of disappointment I’ve seen in some other people his age. He moved through life lightly, as if it were something to be explored rather than figured out — living. Or at least, that’s what it looked like to me.

I’ve been thinking about their essay since I read it, and I think what got to me was how familiar the whole thing felt. I’m always looking forward to something. Finishing something, getting somewhere, making enough money, feeling more secure about my future. Even when things are going well, I find a way to turn my attention towards whatever hasn’t happened yet. It’s genuinely exhausting being inside my own head sometimes, especially when I realise I’ve spent an entire day worrying about a life I haven’t even lived yet.

And it’s embarrassing because I can recognise the pattern while I’m doing it. I know I’ve wanted things that I have now, and I know how quickly I’ve stopped being excited about some of them. At the time, those things felt important enough to think about constantly. I imagined how happy I’d be when they finally happened, and then they happened, and life continued. I still had bad days, still worried about money and work, still found new things to be unhappy about. The achievement was real, obviously, but the feeling I’d attached to it was nowhere near as permanent as I’d imagined. Apparently, I can spend months looking forward to something and then give myself approximately three business days to enjoy it before finding something else to obsess over.

I hate how easily we get used to our own lives. Things that once felt exciting become ordinary, and then we start looking elsewhere for that same feeling. I don’t even think this is always about being ungrateful. Sometimes we’re simply so used to wanting something that we have absolutely no idea what to do with ourselves once we get it. We’re good at chasing things and considerably worse at figuring out what happens after the chase is over.

And please don’t mistake this for me suggesting that everyone should sit around appreciating what they have while ignoring everything that’s wrong. I have bills to pay, plans I want to make, and plenty of things about my life that I’d happily change tomorrow if I could. Money can make an enormous difference to how you experience the world, and pretending otherwise is ridiculous. I’m also aware that telling someone to enjoy their life when they’re struggling to get through the week is incredibly easy when you aren’t the one dealing with their circumstances. I’m talking about something else entirely: the strange habit of treating every stage of life as something to get through before the supposedly better part begins.

I catch myself doing this with age, too. I think about where I should be by a certain age, what I should have figured out, how much money I should be making, whether I’m doing enough with my time. There’s always some imaginary deadline I’ve set for myself, and the requirements keep changing. I could meet every expectation I currently have and still find a reason to feel behind because I’m pretty sure I’d just invent a new set of expectations. At what point am I supposed to sit down and enjoy my own company? When I’ve achieved everything I want? What happens when I want something else? Am I supposed to keep doing this until I’m eighty?

The annoying thing is that I genuinely want a good future. I want to be comfortable, I want to do work I care about, and I want to have enough money that every minor inconvenience doesn’t turn into a financial calculation. I want to look after myself and the people I love. I don’t want to pretend these things are irrelevant just to prove that I’ve learned how to live in the present. I just don’t understand why wanting a better life has to involve being so dissatisfied with the one I’m currently living.

I think that’s what I’m struggling with more than anything. I don’t know how to care about my future without constantly worrying about it, and I don’t know how to work towards something without convincing myself that I’ll finally be happy once I get there. Those two things have become so tangled up in my head that I can barely tell when I’m making plans and when I’m just making myself miserable over things that haven’t happened.

Reading my subscriber’s essay made me think about how much importance I’ve given to the idea of eventually understanding everything. I’ve spent years assuming that growing up would make life clearer, that at some point I’d stop feeling so uncertain about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I don’t think that expectation has entirely disappeared, even now. Part of me still believes there’s a version of adulthood where everything settles down, where I stop questioning myself so much and finally feel like I know what I’m doing. I have absolutely no evidence that this version of adulthood exists, yet here I am, waiting for it.

And I don’t want to turn this into some grand revelation about how I’ve decided to live differently from now on. I know myself. I’ll probably wake up tomorrow, check my phone, worry about something completely unnecessary, and spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about what comes next. I’m sure I’ll continue making plans and wanting things and getting impatient when they take too long. I don’t expect to suddenly become a person who has made peace with every uncertainty in his life.

I just wish I could stop treating my current life as something I’ll eventually look back on. I’m so busy imagining how I’ll feel about these years when I’m older that I sometimes forget I’m the person actually living through them. These are my days, too. They count even if I’m confused, even if I’m still figuring out what I want, even if my life looks nothing like what I thought it would at this age.

I don’t have some beautiful answer to any of this. I still want things to happen, and I still want my life to look different in a hundred ways. I just don’t want every day until then to feel like an inconvenience. I’ve spent enough time waiting to become someone who knows what he’s doing. For once, I’d like to let myself be a person who’s figuring things out without making that the only thing he does.

Co-Author Substack ID:

Maxim

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