When Anticipation Becomes a Distraction
By: Madison Miller
Have we gotten so used to looking forward to things that we’ve forgotten how to actually be where we are? Recently, the quiet assumption that I’ll eventually arrive in my real life has been growing louder. Right now I’m in college, but then I’ll get the internship. I'll graduate, get the job and make more money. Eventually I’ll move somewhere cool and have the right apartment, clothes, relationship, routine, social life, whatever. And once those things happen, I'll finally feel like the person I’m supposed to be.
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The Future Has an Unfair Advantage
Maybe part of the reason the future is so easy to romanticize is because it hasn’t had the chance to disappoint us yet. We get to imagine a version of our lives without all the boring, uncomfortable or painful parts that reality inevitably brings. The relationship hasn’t ended, the job hasn’t become stressful, and the person we thought we would become hasn’t had the chance to turn out differently yet, so we get to preserve that version exactly as we imagined it.
Sometimes I even think we grieve lives we never actually lived. Not because we lost something that was ours, but because we lost the possibility of what it could have been.
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The High before it Happens
I think part of what makes anticipation so powerful is that the feeling starts before anything actually happens. Looking forward to something can create positive emotions before we ever experience the thing itself. There’s a real physiological reason for that feeling too. According to a 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, anticipating positive things can activate parts of our brain connected to emotion and reward, which helps explain why simply imagining something can feel so good. So, anticipation isn’t necessarily bad or something we need to get rid of. It can make us happy, motivate us, and give us something to look forward to. I just wonder what happens when we start spending more time enjoying the life we’ve imagined than the one that we are currently living.
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What Already Is
Maybe the goal isn’t to stop imagining what comes next. As humans, it is inevitable that we are going to look forward to things, make plans, and picture what we want our lives to look like. However, it is important to recognize how dangerous it can be to constantly compare reality to a version of life that reality could never compete with. At what point does looking forward in life become a way of avoiding the life we’re currently living? Eventually, you realize that the days you’re just trying to “get through” are literally your life. The future will always hold the advantage of possibility, but I’ve learned I don’t want to become so attached to what could be that I miss what already is.
