Not thinking about the future... and that's okay
People quickly become preachers of preparing for the future anytime advice is asked of them. Topics ranging from mitigating risks to saving money for retirement are one of many placed upon your proverbial plate. If you’re an adult or if you’re a teenager, it can be quite stressful to think about things that have yet to happen (or if they ever happen). I believe this new concept of preparing for the unknown is relatively new.
Even if you go 100 years back, thinking about the future is tough to do when you’ve got wars and dictators to think about. But as technology and modern medicine came, the population age rose accordingly. Now as we see people living up to over 100 years old, long-term thinking becomes normalized. Thinking in the long term is an ideology that has been passed on to us, and we’ll continue to spread it to others as well.
There are many benefits we can name on top of our heads when asked about thinking about the future, but what if we did the inverse. What if we only lived for the moment, and let our actions get influenced by the present? I pose this question after a conversation with a colleague. She was plagued with anxiety and doubt every time she would think about the future. The stress would send her into bouts of depression and leave her bedridden for days. It naturally leaked into her mood, energy, physical wellness, and social life.
I’m a big believer in doing difficult things, and sometimes brewing in them to not only build character and resiliency but to train myself on the fact that tough things will pass. It teaches me not to overreact and to take a step back to detach and accurately analyze the situation better. It’s not the end of the world because this is just a brief moment in time and I’ll look back on it very soon. Whether it’s going through a breakup, doing terrible in school, gaining weight, or losing friends—all bad things shall pass.
My friend, however, worried me about her behavior and actions. You never know what someone can tolerate or the front they put up until they do an irreversible action and take their own life. Fortunately, I was blessed to learn her new strategy for a better life—thinking in the short term only.
Blasphemy?!
I won’t lie, my verbal response was how proud I am that she conquered what was basically killing her and how much happier she was, but inside, I was flabbergasted by what I just heard. I was dumbfounded because it was against everything that I believed in and was raised on.
I’ve seen many struggles with their own life because they didn’t have a plan or discipline. I’ve listened to many friends talk about how they put off paying off their loans and now they won’t know when they’ll be able to do it. Many adults in my life would have health and weight issues because of their habits and behaviors developed in their youth, and now they’re paying for it via less interaction with grandkids.
I didn’t want any of this to happen to me so I made sure to list down all the things that I needed to do and how to get there. At first, it was tough since I saw most of my friends go out and have fun, but I chose not to because I thought it’d be a tiny step towards financial independence one day. I by no means starved myself of social interaction and going out, but I wasn’t cavalier about spending. Delaying the short-term rewards has served me well and I saw the benefits years after, and it’s only compounding.
Perhaps that’s why I was so shocked, what you miss when you don’t think about the long term is the direction of where you want to go. The analogy of running into a brick wall comes into mind. You can work as hard as you want and with as much determination as you want, and eventually, maybe that brick wall will crumble, but at the end of the day, you’re still running into a brick wall. Long-term planning shows you if you keep running into it, you’ll waste more time and effort. Why not just go around it, or find a way to scale over it.
Similar to how entrepreneurs think about solving the world’s problems, it takes some forecasting into the future and going all-in on it. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and more saw how powerful the internet will be so they dedicated all of their time and effort to creating businesses with the internet as a catalyst.
Opening my mind
I could go on about why long-term planning is my preferred choice in how I make decisions, but what’s more important was how closed-minded I was to my friend’s statements. The point of thinking, in general, is to be open-minded to changes and adapt your strategy as so. If you’re trying to save money by biking everywhere, but it affects your performance at work, perhaps it’s time to buy a car. Sure, you might save money with the bike, but if your workplace doesn’t have a shower and you clients to meet, it’ll affect your work. The fact that my reaction to short-term planning was so profound left me wondering what else am I not considering.
By thinking my way is the best way perhaps has closed off some opportunities. The worst part was my instant reaction wasn’t to be happy for her, it was my adverse reaction to the short-term thinking. More questions arose, when did I become so conditioned and adamant in mindset over personal decisions and happiness?
Whenever someone makes a decision that we don’t like, it’s easy to label it as a brash, or sometimes, stupid decision. We don’t always have to agree with our friends, but we can try to be open to their thinking and decisions. Use what we learn from them, and see if it allows us to think in a different way.
Instead of running through the brick wall, or scaling it, how about we just not take the route that leads to the brick wall?
Until next week,
Scott
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