Which is fucking hilarious.

My dad died a couple months ago. I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional household. I spent years being incredibly self-destructive. I’ve gone through periods of my life that were absolute fucking hell. I’m not going to unpack my entire history here just to prove I’ve suffered enough to be allowed to talk about joy. That would completely miss the point.

Because when did we decide that joyful people must be people who haven’t suffered?

Some of the most joyful people I’ve ever known have been through shit you wouldn’t wish on anyone. I’ve watched people with very little laugh harder than people who seemingly have everything. And I’ve watched people with comfortable lives become absolutely fucking miserable inside them.

I’ve been both people.

There were years when I let everything that happened to me become the place I lived. You can do that. You can take every horrible thing that happened, every person who hurt you, every loss, every disappointment, and slowly build yourself a little prison out of it.

And the fucked-up thing about that kind of prison is that you take it with you.

You can leave the person. Leave the house. Get older. Move somewhere else. Change your entire life. You can be standing beside a river on the most beautiful fucking day imaginable and still be sitting inside a cage built from something that happened twenty years ago.

At some point I started realizing I didn’t want to do that anymore.

That doesn’t mean pretending terrible things weren’t terrible. It doesn’t mean “choosing happiness” every morning and magically becoming immune to grief. My dad is still dead. There are things from my past that will probably always hurt when I touch them. I don’t need to turn any of that into a fucking inspirational quote.

But I also don’t need to be miserable forever to prove it mattered.

I don’t owe my past the rest of my life.

And I sure as fuck don’t owe anybody seriousness just because serious things have happened to me.

I want to laugh until I can’t breathe. I want to get stupidly excited about an animal I’ve seen a hundred times. I want to go in the river. Dance badly. Say the dumb thing. Lose my fucking mind over the moon. Be impressed by moss. Be ridiculous with my kid. I want to be embarrassingly easy to delight.

Maybe part of that comes from knowing exactly what the other way feels like.

I’ve spent enough time miserable. I’ve spent enough time angry. I’ve spent enough time inside my own head letting things that already happened continue happening to me.

Fuck that.

And yes, I absolutely believe what you put out into the world changes what comes back to you. Not because I think the universe is some vending machine where you insert positive thoughts and receive a perfect life. Obviously bad shit still happens. People die. People hurt you. Life can completely fucking flatten you whether you have a good attitude about it or not.

I mean something much simpler.

Walk around expecting everyone to be an asshole and eventually the whole world starts looking hostile. Walk around afraid of looking stupid and you’ll find a thousand reasons not to do anything. Keep yourself closed and people meet a closed person.

But walk through the world curious and people show you things. Laugh and other people start laughing. Be ridiculous and suddenly somebody else feels safe being ridiculous too. Get excited about something and watch how often another person starts getting excited with you.

You change the room you walk into.

And after enough rooms, that starts looking a lot like changing your life.

I know there will always be people who think joy is naive. That being serious makes you deeper somehow. That if you’ve really understood how fucked up the world can be, you should walk around appropriately miserable about it.

I don’t buy that anymore.

I know exactly how dark life can get.

That’s precisely why I’m not giving darkness anything it hasn’t already fucking taken.

I’m going to laugh. I’m going to be stupid. I’m going to get way too excited. I’m going to embarrass myself. I’m going to love things loudly. I’m going to keep finding completely unnecessary reasons to be delighted that I’m here.

Not because life has always been good to me.

Because it fucking hasn’t.

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That was the flex: look how much land I can afford not to use.

Imagine being a farmer trying to squeeze dinner out of every usable patch of soil while some aristocrat nearby has forty acres dedicated to shortness. Not wheat. Not potatoes. Not sheep. Just an extremely expensive green nothing.

And somehow that status symbol escaped the estate, crossed centuries, moved into suburbia, and became a chore for ordinary people. The king is gone, the estate is gone, the servants are gone, but Greg still has to mow.

That’s where it gets completely ridiculous. We water the grass because we want it to grow, fertilize it because we want it to grow better, then get irritated when it actually grows and buy a machine whose entire purpose is making the ground shorter again. Then we repeat this for the rest of our lives.

Meanwhile a dandelion shows up requiring absolutely nothing from us. It finds its own water, handles the weather, reproduces successfully, and generally seems perfectly capable of managing its own affairs. Naturally, this cannot be tolerated.

So the grass gets irrigation, fertilizer, seed, aeration, specialized equipment and what is basically a small outpatient medical team, while the plant thriving completely on its own gets poisoned for being in the wrong place.

Somehow we also turned the whole thing into a personality test. Short lawn means responsible. Long lawn means lazy. Dandelions mean neglect. Let the grass get high enough and the neighbors start wondering whether somebody died inside.

That might be the funniest part. A centuries-old display of aristocratic excess eventually became a moral obligation for people who have to go to work on Monday.

The lawn started as wealthy people saying, “Look how much land I can afford not to use,” and ended with ordinary people spending their weekends standing behind a mower thinking, fuck, it grew again.

The longer I think about that, the stranger it gets.

Washing clothes used to take hours of physical labor. Messages took days or weeks to arrive. Traveling any real distance could eat up an entire day or several of them. Food took longer to grow, preserve, prepare and acquire. Information that now takes ten seconds to find could once require a trip to a library, a phone call or simply not knowing.

Now machines wash our clothes and dishes. Cars carry us miles in minutes. Food shows up at the door. A message can cross the planet before you put your phone back in your pocket.

All of this was supposed to save time.

So where the hell did it go?

Because it certainly doesn’t feel like we kept it.

Every time something became faster, the speed eventually stopped feeling miraculous and became the new expectation.

Email didn’t mean we could communicate in a fraction of the time and then go fuck off for the afternoon. It meant we could send more messages and expect faster answers.

Cars didn’t just shorten distances. They expanded how far away we could reasonably be expected to go.

Work became faster and we didn’t respond by working less. We responded by deciding more work could fit into the same day.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

We never really got the saved time back. We just raised the amount of shit a person could reasonably be expected to accomplish inside it.

And now we’re surrounded by technology that would look like actual sorcery to someone from a few centuries ago while constantly feeling like we’re behind.

Behind what?

There isn’t some universal list we’re all failing to finish. There is just an ever-expanding definition of what should fit inside a day.

And technology didn’t only make things faster. It removed the places where life used to be temporarily unreachable.

The store was closed.

The letter was still traveling.

Nobody was home.

You didn’t know the answer yet.

You were on your way.

There was nothing you could fucking do about any of it.

Now you can answer from bed. Work from an airport. Buy something at midnight. Check your bank account while standing in line. Respond to someone from the middle of the woods. Solve tomorrow’s problem while you’re supposedly living today.

We made nearly every minute available for something.

And then we started treating an available minute like an empty apartment: apparently somebody needs to move the fuck in.

An empty afternoon becomes time to catch up. A quiet drive becomes time to make a call. A walk becomes time to listen to a podcast. Waiting becomes scrolling. Even rest has to justify itself by making us more productive afterward.

We have become remarkably uncomfortable with time that isn’t doing anything.

Which makes the phrase “saving time” pretty fucking funny.

Save it for what?

Imagine showing someone from 200 years ago an ordinary modern house.

Clean water comes out of the wall. Machines wash the clothes and dishes. Food stays cold for days. Dinner can be summoned to the front door. A little rectangle lets you speak to someone across an ocean. You can get into a machine outside and travel farther before lunch than they might have traveled in days.

They’d probably assume all of this finally bought us an astonishing amount of freedom.

Then they’d look around and ask:

“So when did you finally stop being so fucking busy?”

And that’s where the whole story falls apart.

The machines worked.

They really did save time.

We just built a world that learned how to spend every minute they saved before we ever got to call it ours.

Caught up on what? Life? Because apparently we’ve all been trying to complete that motherfucker.

There’s always some imaginary point in the near future where everything is going to be handled. After this week. After this bill. After this appointment. After the house is clean. After the messages are answered. After whatever completely new bullshit showed up on Tuesday. Then we can relax.

Except Tuesday has an unlimited supply of bullshit.

You don’t finish most of adult life. You maintain it. You buy groceries and then have the audacity to eat them. You clean the house and apparently continue living in it afterward. You pay every bill and thirty days later everyone would like money again. You answer everything and somehow more people acquire questions.

Nothing stays done.

Obviously life has always required tending. Humans have always had shit to do. Food had to be found. Fires had to stay lit. Children had to be watched. Things broke. Winter came. But there was an edge to things that increasingly feels like it doesn’t exist anymore.

Now almost anything can reach you at almost any time and become something else to deal with. Another message. Another email. Another password. Another renewal. Another appointment. Another notification. Another thing to research, schedule, cancel, update, remember, replace or pay for. You can be lying completely still in bed and somehow be behind on seventeen things.

That is fucking bizarre.

Somewhere along the way, we started quietly moving our lives into the future. We’ll enjoy ourselves when things settle down. Take the trip later. Sit outside when everything is done. Make the thing when there’s more time. Do absolutely nothing for an afternoon when we’ve finally earned the right to stop.

Later.

There’s always a later.

Until there isn’t.

The groceries aren’t going to stay purchased. The house isn’t going to stay clean. Your responsibilities are never going to gather one afternoon, shake your hand and announce that you have successfully completed adulthood.

There is no magical Wednesday when life finally stops requiring maintenance and hands you the rest of your existence as uninterrupted free time.

We know this. And yet how many times have we said it?

“I just need to get through this week.”

How many fucking weeks have we been getting through?

Some of this exhaustion isn’t even about how much we’re doing. It’s the constant expectation that eventually we’ll be done. We keep waiting for the relief of completion while living inside a system where almost everything regenerates.

No wonder people fantasize about disappearing to a cabin. A mountain. A beach. Some road with no destination. Throwing the phone into a lake. Vanishing for a month where nobody can ask them for a fucking thing.

Maybe the fantasy isn’t really about disappearing.

Maybe it’s about finally experiencing a moment that doesn’t feel like it owes something to the next one.

Because if you wait until life is finished before you start living it, you’re going to wait forever. There will always be dishes somewhere. Something unanswered. Something that could be improved. Something that needs money.

There will always be another fucking Tuesday.

This isn’t the shit standing between you and your life.

This is your life.

And I refuse to spend the whole thing trying to get it out of the way.

Because somehow we started using those sentences like they mean the same thing.

There isn’t enough food.

Except there is food. Sometimes so much that stores throw it into dumpsters.

There isn’t enough housing.

Except you can walk through cities full of dark windows in empty apartments while people sleep outside.

You can’t get the medicine you need.

Except the medicine exists. Somebody already made it. It’s sitting on a shelf somewhere.

That is fucking weird.

We’ve become so accustomed to this arrangement that we barely notice the difference between something not existing and something existing but being inaccessible to you.

Those are completely different problems.

Actual scarcity makes perfect sense. Six people. Three apples. Somebody isn’t getting an apple.

But humans managed to invent something much more impressive: six people, twenty apples, and a system explaining why three people still can’t have one.

Then we call that scarcity too.

And because we were born into this arrangement, it doesn’t sound absurd. The rules feel like they came with the planet.

They didn’t.

Money didn’t grow out of the soil. Credit scores weren’t discovered beneath a rock. Property lines aren’t faintly visible from space. Nature did not hand us an insurance deductible.

We invented abstractions because abstractions are useful. Then we got so fucking good at believing in them that eventually they became capable of overruling physical reality.

The apple is real.

The hunger is real.

But somehow the invisible thing between them gets the final vote.

And the strangest part isn’t even that we built a world this way.

It’s how quickly people defend the arrangement when you simply point out how bizarre it looks.

Say, “That building is empty and that person has nowhere to sleep,” and within thirty seconds someone is explaining capitalism or socialism or property rights or why nobody is entitled to anything.

Okay.

The building is still fucking empty.

That’s the part I’m interested in.

We’ve become extraordinarily sophisticated at explaining why things that physically exist cannot go to people who physically need them.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we ran out.

Sometimes there’s plenty.

You’re just not allowed to have it.

“What did you do today?” Nothing. Oh. Better luck tomorrow. But spend those same four hours answering emails you won’t remember next month and suddenly the afternoon has been used correctly. Sit beside a river for three hours? Waste of time. Sit under fluorescent lights for three hours making someone else money? Productive. Answer a work message while taking a shit? Dedicated. Apparently the problem was never that the hours disappeared. The problem was that nobody got anything out of you while they did.

And once you notice that, our entire relationship with time starts looking ridiculous. We brag about being busy. We brag about working late. We brag about skipping lunch. We announce that we “haven’t had a second to ourselves” like we just won something. Congratulations. You successfully had less of your own life today. Here’s your cold pizza.

And somehow we’re more afraid of wasting a random Tuesday afternoon than we are of waking up twenty years from now and realizing we gave away thousands of them. Because the afternoon disappears either way. Three o’clock does not give a shit whether you were productive. The sun does not pause until you finish your inbox. Wednesday does not issue performance reviews. You are the only one who has been convinced that your tiny stretch of existence needs to keep submitting evidence that it was useful.

Maybe you really did spend the whole afternoon doing nothing. Maybe nothing got improved, monetized, optimized or crossed off a fucking list. Maybe you just got to have the afternoon.

And I’m starting to think that might be the exact opposite of wasting it.

Imagine describing it to someone who had never encountered modern civilization.

“You spend the healthiest decades of your life working so that one day, if everything goes according to plan, you’ll finally have enough time to live.”

Would that sound obvious?

Or would it sound like one of the stranger ideas a civilization has ever come up with?

What fascinates me isn’t that people save money. Every species prepares for the future in some way. Birds build nests before they lay eggs. Squirrels gather food before winter. Preparation itself isn’t unusual.

What’s unusual is postponing life.

Somewhere along the way, we blurred the line between preparing for the future and living in it. The future stopped being something we planned for and became the place where everything meaningful was supposed to happen.

I’ll travel when I retire.

I’ll slow down when I retire.

I’ll finally have time when I retire.

Without realizing it, “later” became one of the most powerful ideas in modern life.

The strange thing about later is that it doesn’t exist anywhere except in our imagination. You can make plans for the future, but you can never experience it. Every future eventually arrives disguised as the present.

That’s all any of us have ever had.

Maybe that’s why so many people have the persistent feeling that life hasn’t quite started yet. Not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because they’ve been taught that the important part comes after the next milestone. After the promotion. After the mortgage. After retirement.

The destination keeps moving.

Children don’t naturally think this way. They don’t wake up wondering how to optimize the next forty years. They disappear into creeks, climb trees, build forts, invent worlds, lose track of time. They’re participating in life, not preparing for it.

Something changes as we get older. Preparation quietly expands until it occupies more and more of the space that life used to fill.

I’m not arguing against planning. Planning is necessary.

I’m questioning what happens when preparation becomes the main event.

Maybe the strangest part of retirement isn’t retirement itself.

Maybe it’s that an entire culture became comfortable treating its healthiest years as the appropriate time to postpone living.

If another intelligent species stumbled across that idea, I wonder whether it would see wisdom—

or whether it would wonder how a civilization became so convinced that life was safest somewhere else.