An Approach To An Unlived Life
Table of Contents
How A Life Can Be Unlived
The obvious answer is death, but I’m writing about life today, not death. An unlived life is all the things you someday imagining living through but never got to. caused by all sorts of reasons, never affording to go to that Japan trip, never having the guts to call your crush, always feeling awkward enough not to make the big goodbye talk when your father was in his deathbed, never getting into Japanese jazz fusion or Russian literature, and everything that one day looked like a future so prophetically predicted that you felt like you already have them as memories and experiences, rather than dreams and future plans.
It is a very human fear, to miss out1, but it can get complicated. sometimes it’s not an absence of action that causes the unlived life, but a displaced course of stages of life that we go through. living like a teenager when you’re middle-aged, talking like a grandfather when you’re a teen, worrying about retirement and mortgage when you’re only 22. this goes back a lot to the kind of life you live. whether life starts to throw at you the lemons. the problematic element here is the fact that the lemons are almost always more than we can possibly make lemonades with. the input’s often an endless stream of big and small errands that need attendance.
The second element is our crooked, elastic view of time. every year feels shorter and shorter. with blowing every birthday cake, a year becomes an ever-decreasing percentage of the life you’ve lived so far. 1/7 for a 7-years-old kid but 1/80 for an old man in the nursery.
Footnotes
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FOMO is a very real thing! ↩