Featured Essay: What if the Life You Planned No Longer Fits?
You made the decision. You did the research. You built the business, moved to France, changed direction, or created the life you thought you wanted.
And then you began living it.
That’s when things became interesting.
Something you expected to love mattered less than you imagined. Something you barely considered became important. A new question appeared. An old assumption stopped making sense. A possibility you hadn’t planned for caught your attention.
None of this necessarily means you made the wrong decision.
It may mean something much simpler—and more useful.
You know things now that you couldn’t have known before you began.
The plan was made with the information you had
We put enormous effort into making good decisions. We research, we compare, we ask people who have done it before, we make spreadsheets, we calculate costs, we imagine ordinary Tuesdays, not just holidays. And still, there are things we cannot know from the life we’re living before the change.
You can research what it costs to live in France. You can’t entirely research what it will feel like when conducting the smallest transaction requires more concentration than it did at home.
You can investigate a new profession. You can’t know exactly how you’ll experience being a beginner again.
You can plan for retirement. You can’t know which parts of your professional identity you’ll be delighted to leave behind and which you’ll unexpectedly miss.
You can build a business around work you’re good at and later discover that the part you thought would be peripheral is the part you find most interesting.
Research gives us information.
Living gives us different information.
And we only get the second kind by beginning.
Then the plan meets the life
This is where we sometimes become unnecessarily hard on ourselves.
We assume that if the experience doesn’t match the expectation, something has gone wrong. Perhaps we didn’t research enough. Perhaps we weren’t realistic. Perhaps we’re insufficiently grateful. Perhaps everyone else is managing this better. Perhaps we should try harder to appreciate the life we worked so hard to create. Or perhaps the discrepancy is simply new information.
The plan wasn’t a contract. It was our best attempt to imagine a future from a place where we hadn’t lived it yet. Now we’re standing somewhere else.
Of course the view is different. Imagination gives way to actuality. Now there is something to notice. To pay attention to. To take account of.
Like it or not, there it is.
Not all new information is bad news
There’s another reason I think this matters.
When we talk about expectations not matching reality, we usually mean disappointment.
But some of the most interesting discrepancies work in the other direction. You discover that you love something you thought you’d merely tolerate. You become fascinated by a subject that had never particularly interested you. You find yourself wanting less of something you once worked very hard to acquire. A friendship becomes unexpectedly important. A place you hadn’t considered feels remarkably comfortable.
You begin making something. Reading something. Learning something. Wanting something. Or perhaps you notice that a version of yourself you expected to miss hasn’t been missed very much at all.
These aren’t problems to solve.
They’re information too.
The temptation to explain too quickly
We’re very good at making experience coherent. Something happens and almost immediately we begin telling ourselves what it means.
This proves I made the wrong decision.
I’m just homesick.
It’s only because I’m tired.
I’m having a midlife crisis.
I’m too old to start something new.
This is obviously what I’m supposed to do next.
I’m being unrealistic.
Maybe.
Any one of those explanations could eventually turn out to be accurate. But explanations do something important: they organize what we notice next.
Once I’ve decided I’m homesick, I start interpreting my experience through homesickness.
Once I’ve decided I’ve made a mistake, I begin collecting evidence for the mistake.
Once I’ve decided a new interest is impractical, I stop taking my interest very seriously.
Once I’ve decided an unexpected possibility is “meant to be,” I may stop asking useful questions about that too.
We don’t have to refuse interpretation.
Perhaps we can simply let it arrive a little later.
Start with what you know now
There’s a much less dramatic place to begin.
What’s different from what I expected?
Not better.
Not worse.
Different.
What has become more important? What matters less? What feels easier than I anticipated? What requires more from me? What do I miss? What don’t I miss? What am I suddenly curious about? What keeps capturing my attention? What have I learned about myself that I couldn’t have learned while I was still making the plan?
Those questions don’t require us to change anything. They don’t even require us to know what the answers mean.
They simply allow us to gather information from the life we’re actually living rather than the one we imagined.
You don’t owe your former self the original plan
I find this particularly interesting because plans can acquire a peculiar authority once we’ve made them.
We announced the move. Started the business. Took the job. Retired. Told everyone how excited we were. Perhaps we spent years making it possible.
Then the person who actually lives the decision discovers something the person who made it couldn’t have known. And yet we can feel strangely obligated to the earlier version of the plan.
Changing your understanding doesn’t necessarily invalidate the decision that came before it. The woman who made that decision had the information available to her then.
You have information she didn’t have.
That’s not inconsistency. That’s what happens when a hypothetical life becomes an actual one.
You don’t have to turn every observation into a decision.
This may be the part I have come to appreciate most.
Noticing something does not obligate us to act on it.
You can acknowledge that something doesn’t fit without immediately dismantling your life. You can become interested in a possibility without pursuing it. You can miss something without deciding you need to recover it. You can love your life and still wonder about another version of it. You can discover that something has become important without knowing what place, if any, it should occupy.
We tend to collapse noticing and deciding into a single step. But they’re different.
There is room between:
Something has captured my attention.
and
Therefore, I must do something about it.
That space is useful.
It lets us become curious before we become strategic.
Perhaps nothing has gone wrong
Maybe the life you planned fits beautifully, but not in quite the way you expected. Maybe parts of it don’t fit at all. Maybe something entirely unplanned has begun growing alongside it. Maybe the question isn’t whether you made the right decision. Maybe you’ve simply reached the point at which the person living the life knows more than the person who planned it.
That seems less like failure to me.
It seems like an invitation to pay attention.
