how to enjoy your life

existential tunnel vision and how to escape it

I’m at a birthday party reconnecting with old friends and loose acquaintances I haven’t seen in months. At every new conversation I’m inevitably asked some iteration of “what have you been up to”, and each time I’m stumped on a charming answer. “Nothing new” comes across strangely pathetic, “just chilling” sounds flippant and dated, and endeavoring on an arbitrary life update feels tedious.

The idea of just living your life has never particularly sat well with me. I find stagnation particularly unsettling — the canonical wake up and you’re 40, stuck in a life you didn’t mean to have rather than one that was deliberately chosen. It’s why I often stretch myself so thin, across demanding jobs, creative endeavors, classes and side hobbies, to keep pushing forward so that I can never be accused of stagnating.

girl on the go

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At a small cafe in san francisco, I’m in the throes of a life update monologue. My instinct is always to steer the conversation towards existential angst — anything else just seems like bad dinner conversation.

We talk about my job, friends & family, life in new york, tiktok, fashion classes, my desire to run away. After processing it all, kristen laughs and asks why I’m trying to ruin my life when everything I’m saying seems to be going well. I tell her my fear of stagnation. She jokes that I’m a masochist, and I’m laughing because she’s not wrong.

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Inside of my nightstand I keep a printed copy of an ask polly article titled “how to stop trying to be better”. I’ve always been a compulsive consumer of self-help content — how to build better habits, be more creative, live healthier, to stop giving a fck — but I never stopped to think why I’m perpetually in a state of striving, longing, and chasing betterment. My internet friend caroline says that the times where she’s consuming the most self help content is oftentimes when she’s the most unwell.

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Lately I’ve been on a journey to enjoy the life I’m living.

Over the long weekend I embarked on the ambitious undertaking of trying to declutter my apartment. At one point, I flipped through an old journal from 2021. In my memory, 2021 was a year of unbridled hedonism and fond memories with some of the people I love most in this world. But reading back on my journal I forget how much of my day to day was spent working 90 hour weeks and being miserable in the process.

One of the entries I come across starts with how profoundly unhappy I am and ends with how all I wanted was to manifest three things that year. It’s easy to forget that the things I have now in my life, the ones that I fail to treasure, are the same things I used to pray for.

My last post centered around the idea of the arrival fallacy — where we can’t expect our achievements to bring us lasting joy. The irony is that I also often fail to take the time to enjoy the life that I’ve built for myself because I’m stuck in a tunnel vision for some future date. Sometimes I’ll watch a vlog of someone visiting new york and feel the romance of the streets and it’ll hit me that I literally live there. And yet day to day I deduce the city down to a running route, the commute to work or the filler setting on the way to a more exciting venue.

comfort creator

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I joked to someone the other day that I often don’t realize that I’m alive. It’s an asinine comment to make, but also an earnest one. For weeks at a time, I live on autopilot, playing a video game of my life, reacting to external stimulus, chasing momentum rather than taking time to feel myself in the present.

I suspect “enjoying your life” is a lifelong balancing act — something that we never quite figure out but endeavor every day to get a bit closer to the answer.

I debated writing this post because learning to “enjoy your life” is certainly not a practice I feel equipped to speak to. But I’m told by someone I admire that I don’t need to have the answer in order to write the substack. It’s advice I’m trying to put into practice — not pining for the perfect conclusion but aiming to write intuitively, feeling my feelings, and expressing what feels truest to me even if it ends in ambiguity.

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At the birthday party I’m overtired from a long day, but in the red glow of the bar, I feel warm and safe and happy. The voice in my head that’s anxious is quiet for a second, and it feels like I’m remembering something that I keep forgetting.

There are certain moments in my life that I realize, with cosmic clarity that the life I’m living right now are the good times that I will look back on with sweet nostalgia. Being in my 20s, surrounded by love, living in a city both brimming with endless opportunity to explore but also dotted with little enclaves that feel like home.

It’s 10pm on a saturday in february. People are moving back, getting into first relationships, starting new jobs, leaving things behind, but tonight we’re all in the same little pub underneath the street talking about everything and nothing. Drew is telling me how much he’s enjoyed my writing lately and I want to cry as I’m standing there because I’m a little tipsy and my heart feels incredibly full. Time is passing us but we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.

xx tina

the neighborhood pub