stop postponing your life

the present moment is not a waiting room

A few nights ago, I was lying on the couch swallowing tears, Dead Poets Society flickering across the screen. It made me ache to watch those young boys chasing their dreams.

Thoreau’s words echoed through my head. Was I sucking all the marrow out of life? For weeks, existential questions have been hovering over me like a cloud holding its breath, accompanied by a piercing sense of mortality, striking at random times.

Am I living life to its fullest? Or will I be one of the many who, on the deathbed, mourn their lack of courage to live a life true to themselves?

I just left LA for a quiet little mountain town. A few months ago, I was sitting on the beach, imagining myself on cross country skis surrounded by trees. But either it’s too grey, there’s not enough snow, I’m too tired, or work keeps me home. There’s always a reason to postpone.

Instead, I daydream about the days I can step outside bare-armed again, sun blasting in my face. I might not even look back at life with regret. I’ll be busy wondering what it’d be like to cross over from a different hospital bed.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with this sense that real life is waiting for me just around the corner, sometimes many miles away. Once I’d arrive, I’d get dressed fabulously every morning, hit the trails on all the days, write my way through dawn, host dinner parties, bake on Sundays, and dance on my lawn.

I’ve been going in circles: painfully aware of the predicament but unequipped to change it. Until I learned there was a name for this pattern: inauthentic futurity.

Inauthentic futurity is a way of living in which life is never fully chosen but continually put off. The concept was coined by existentialist philosopher Heidegger.¹ It’s when you treat the present as a waiting room—sensing that your real life is somewhere else, later. You don’t reject your life outright. You delay inhabiting it.

Kierkegaard saw this predicament as the central sickness of modern existence. Once I understand myself more… once conditions are right… once I feel certain—then I will live.

But that moment never arrives. And so existence is indefinitely deferred.

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Existentialism doesn’t just diagnose the problem—it offers an answer. And it’s disarmingly simple: commitment.

Kierkegaard saw commitment as the moment when existence becomes chosen rather than postponed. It doesn’t eliminate longing; it gives it somewhere to land. Longing isn’t asking to be solved. It’s asking to be answered. Commitment answers by saying: I belong here now.

When you commit, life stops being hypothetical. Identity stops being imagined. Meaning is no longer anticipated but created.

Attachment theory mirrors this insight. When care has no consistent object, the psyche stays in a state of search. The energy turns inward and hardens into ache. But when you channel this energy into devotion, you soothe the “something is missing” loop. It gives your care a home.

Longing, then, isn’t lack.

It’s love without an address.

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Social media doesn’t just show us a plethora of potential lives—it fragments our ability to choose one. We get stuck in fantasies as perfect as the content that planted them. We can do anything so we end up doing nothing except watch everybody else do something. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, Kierkegaard says.

There is no perfect life waiting somewhere in the distant galaxies of the future. The perfect life is the one you’re living your way into in the now. It’s the one you choose to commit to. It’s with the kids you raise even though you could have travelled the world or had a bigger career, it’s the small business you start even though you work twice as hard now, it’s the novel you labor even though it means you can’t also paint and teach.

No choice will ever be perfect because there are endless possibilities for how your fate could unfold. There is no singular best way for how to spend your time. But there is a guaranteed way to waste it: by romanticizing futures you never end up choosing. Your task is not to find the most perfect version of your life but to find what feels true and commit to it. Perfection lives in the commitment to what’s imperfect—but undeniably yours.

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Now what?

To get concrete, here are a few simple ways that are helping me decode my longings and turn them into commitment.

1. Choose your devotion. Complete this sentence: If this longing were allowed to take shape in my actual life, it would ask me to show up for ____ regularly. If the answer feels vague, keep refining until it’s concrete.

2. Make a vow. Choose a time frame. Decide how often you’ll show up. Remove mood from the equation. Don’t wait for the right conditions—let commitment create them. For me, it’s writing at least three days a week.

3. Discipline the mind. Whenever I catch myself wondering if real life is elsewhere, I try to interrupt the daydream and remind myself: this is just misplaced energy. Then, I ask myself: What action would move me 5% closer—today?

4. Fast from comparison. I’ve been limiting scrolling and other media inputs most days. It helps me tend to what’s already here and keeps me focused. Even if you commit to just one day a week without input, that already creates some space.

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Turns out, I don’t need a better plan. I just need a place to land.

For now, that’s the page.

Until next week,

We made it out on the Nordic trails this week—and so did the sun.

“Every moment of existence is pregnant with eternity.” — Søren Kierkegaard

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1. From Utopian Horizon Value Theory: A Transformative Power at the Heart of Human Futurity (2023)