Why You Keep Putting Off the Life You Actually Want
“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself.”
“I wish I hadn't worked so hard.”
“I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends.”
These are among the regrets palliative carer Bronnie Ware says she repeatedly heard from people near the end of their lives. She recorded five of the most common in her memoir, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
None of them is about a larger house or another promotion.
They sound like different regrets, but I hear the same sentence underneath them: there was a life I wanted, and I kept putting it off.
This is not an article about death. It is about the years we are living now—and why it is so easy to treat them as the waiting room for our real life.
The regrets that last concern who we never became
Short-term regret often attaches itself to something we did: the embarrassing message, the poor decision or the moment we wish we could replay.
The regrets that endure can look different.
Across six studies, psychologists Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich found that people's lasting regrets were more likely to concern the gap between their actual selves and their ideal selves—the person they hoped to become—than the person they believed duty required them to be. When participants named their single greatest regret, 76% described one connected with their unfulfilled ideal self. Read the research on people's most enduring regrets.
That does not mean responsibility is unimportant. It means that, over time, the possibilities we never explored can stay with us.
Most of us already understand this at some level. Yet the life we want is remarkably easy to file under “one day”.
One day, when work calms down.
When the mortgage is smaller.
When the children are older.
When we have earned the right to enjoy it.
“One day” feels responsible because it does not require us to reject the dream. It simply allows us to postpone it without choosing a date.
Your future self can feel like somebody else
One reason for this may be the way we relate to the person who will eventually live with today's decisions.
Research led by psychologist Hal Hershfield found that people varied in how connected they felt to their future selves. In an early brain-imaging study, neural patterns when some participants considered their future selves resembled the patterns produced when they thought about another person. Later experiments found that making an older future self more vivid through age-progressed images encouraged people to allocate more money to later rewards. Read an overview of the future-self research.
The practical idea is powerful: when future you feels vague and distant, the needs of today usually win.
A specific deadline wins against retirement. A difficult afternoon wins against the life you say you want in five years. The present arrives in full colour, complete with notifications, tiredness and somebody asking what is for dinner. The future arrives as a faint concept called “financial freedom”.
That is not a fair contest.
Making the future more real helps you make decisions for a person you can actually recognise.
Describe a Tuesday instead of a dream life
Ask somebody what they want their life to look like in five years and the answer can quickly sound like an advert.
Travel more. Financial freedom. A beautiful home. More time.
Those answers may be sincere, but they do not tell you what the life feels like to live.
Try a different question:
Describe an average Tuesday, five years from now.
Make it specific enough that somebody could film it.
What time do you wake up?
Who is in the house?
What does work feel like at eleven in the morning?
How rushed are you?
What happens at lunchtime?
When do you see the people you love?
What do you have energy for at the end of the day?
The question is deliberately ordinary. Your life is not primarily lived during holidays, launches and celebrations. It is made from the days between them.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the world's longest-running studies of adult life, has repeatedly found a strong association between the quality of people's relationships and their health and happiness. The ordinary time spent with our people is not a decorative extra around a successful life. It is a substantial part of what makes life feel good. Read Harvard's account of the findings.
Your future Tuesday may contain ambition, meaningful work and financial growth. It may also contain an unhurried school run, lunch with your partner or the ability to finish work while there is still some day left.
Write what matters to you, including the parts that would never impress a stranger online.
Some of that life may be available now
Once you have written the Tuesday, divide it into two parts.
The first contains what genuinely needs time to build. Perhaps you need a different income, a paid-off debt, a new business model, a move or greater control over your working hours.
The second contains what you could begin protecting now.
This part can be uncomfortable.
You may discover that you have been postponing a weekly walk, a conversation, an afternoon with your children or time with a friend until after you have achieved something entirely unrelated.
My partner and I spent years circling the question of where we would eventually live. “Eventually” allowed us to enjoy the idea without disrupting anything.
Then, sitting in traffic in Dorset, we looked around and realised we did not care that we were stuck. We loved the view. The future suddenly felt specific.
So we moved before the spreadsheet said we had earned it.
It was not a reckless rejection of the future. It was a recognition that the years spent working towards financial freedom still counted as our life.
Those years are not the trailer. They are the film.
Protect present you and future you
There is an obvious danger in taking this idea too far.
You do not need to resign tomorrow, empty your savings or turn every desire into an urgent instruction.
You have two people to protect: the person living today and the person who will inherit the results of today's choices.
Sacrifice everything for later and you may spend years living a life you never wanted. Spend everything now and you may remove choices from the person you are becoming.
The work is to build more of the life you want without quietly selling either person out.
For some decisions, that means waiting and building deliberately. For others, it means noticing that the permission you are waiting for has nothing to do with money or timing.
Turn the Tuesday into one structural change
Once your future Tuesday is clear, ask:
What would have to become structurally true for this day to exist?
If your Tuesday includes finishing work at three, perhaps your income cannot depend entirely on selling more hours.
If it includes less financial anxiety, perhaps you need clearer household numbers, lower fixed costs or a stronger emergency reserve.
If it includes time with friends, perhaps the structural change is as small as putting a recurring date in the calendar rather than hoping everybody will eventually be free.
Write down the conditions beneath the picture. Then choose the first step.
You do not need to solve the entire route tonight. You need an action close enough to take.
That might be:
calculating the monthly cost of your chosen life;
asking whether your employer would consider compressed hours;
testing an offer that could eventually create another source of income;
researching the place you keep talking about moving to;
messaging the friend you keep meaning to contact;
blocking one part of your future Tuesday into next week's calendar.
Give the action an actual day. “Someday” is remarkably good at preserving a dream while preventing it from entering your diary.
The permission is already yours
Of Bronnie Ware's five regrets, the one I find both saddest and most hopeful is: “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
The wording admits something important. They were waiting for permission they already had.
There will always be elements of life you cannot control. There may be financial, practical, health or family constraints that no mindset can remove. But within those limits, it is worth asking whether you are postponing something because it truly has to wait—or because you have never allowed yourself to choose it.
Write the Tuesday.
Name what must become true.
Choose the first step.
Then look for one part of that life that does not need another ten years.
Watch the accompanying video
In If You Can Give Me 7 Minutes, You'll Get 10 Years of Your Life Back, I explore why future you can feel like a stranger, the regrets that last and the ordinary-Tuesday exercise that makes your future life real.
