Carpe Diem, People: Why There's No Use In Waiting For 'Someday'

When it comes to the kind of people who are curious about the world outside their front doors, hometowns and cultures, there are only two types: those who go and those who don’t.

The thought processes and motivations of those who go are well-known, thanks to many viral posts on the Internet.

Fearless, free and occasionally even reckless, they walk the world, sometimes embracing their labels of minimalist, selfish, hippie, vagabond and digital nomad, but often indifferently shrugging them off.

Then there’s the kind that doesn’t go. The kind that says they’re waiting -- for a better time, someone to go with, a certain level of financial stability or for their children to settle down.

They truly do intend to venture into the world and believe they would miss out on many invaluable life experiences if they were never to travel. In their minds, it’s just a question of "when," not "if."

Here’s the fundamental problem with this belief: We don’t know how many minutes, days, weeks or years we have left.

Well, of course, we don’t know; nobody does, but that doesn’t mean we expect the worst.

The general human condition is to go through each day working hard at things that don’t necessarily make us happy in order to prime the course of our lives, in the hope that someday, we’ll finally be able to paint our grand masterpiece.

Of course, this way of living life, or existing, makes one critical assumption: Someday is supposedly a better day in the future, and when it comes, we’re going to be ready for it.

So, as we prep and prime each day, believing the harder we slog through tasks that are both menial and inconsequential to the condition of our happiness, we fail to recognize an important pattern we begin to adopt.

It’s one where we begin to postpone events that make us happy to a future time when we believe we’ll actually deserve that happiness.

It's sort of like how we were treated as children: "If you finish your homework, I’ll take you out for ice cream." It's just, the tasks we’re telling ourselves to get through are much bigger in terms of the effect they have on our lives.

It’s not uncommon to hear things like, “I’m going to work hard, climb the corporate ladder for the next 10 years and when I’m financially strong, I’ll see the world in style."

There are two aspects to this I find it hard to wrap my head around: One, there’s something really wrong about postponing the fulfillment of a dream to a time so far into the future, and two, it’s overly optimistic to believe other variables (such as poor health, debt, other commitments) won’t come into play.

Then there’s the classic, “I have no one to go with.”

If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard that one, I’d take all that cash and book a trip to Antarctica. (It’s expensive, I hear.)

Of course, what’s really being said here is, “I don’t want to feel and look lonely. I don’t want to dine alone in public. And I definitely don’t want to be the person people stop on the street to take a couple or family photo of them.”

To someone who really wants to see the world, the minimal cost of "looking lonely" versus the obviously greater benefit of having his or her mind blown by spectacular landscapes, new cultures, exotic cuisines and a wealth of experiences should be a no-brainer.

At this point, if you’re thinking, "Well, travel is not a priority for everyone and that’s okay," I must say I agree. This isn’t just about the travel dream, it’s about anything that makes us happy, but doesn’t necessarily come with a financial reward.

Thanks to the Internet, it’s now common knowledge that we don’t need to be trustfund babies to travel. We don’t need a whole lot of money saved up before we embark on long-term travel, and there are ways to earn while we do it.

For those of us who don’t like the idea of a permanently nomadic life, or have jobs we love, there are plenty of ways to balance our other priorities with travel, and ensure we see as much of the world as often as we like.

Some people have found ways to travel while they pay off their debt by traveling slowly and working while they travel. So, it can be done.

My problem is with the belief that we don’t deserve to live our happiest moments in the present.

We weave a whole lot of conditions around the core of our ultimate dream, like having X amount of money saved up, or finding the right person to go with, and then spend a lifetime disentangling it all to get to the center.

Life isn’t just something that happens to us. Even when we’re being lazy, hesitant or less-than-proactive about how we want our lives to shape up, we’re actually doing something we may not always realize.

We’re deliberately keeping ourselves from happiness because we believe we can’t, or rather shouldn’t, have it all.

But why shouldn’t we? Why can’t we have it all, or at least try?

There is no someday. All we really have is today. So let’s begin to deal with it.

This post first appeared on The Boho Chica.