A while back I wrote about how the book Die with Zero messed with my head. The long and short is that I spent a lot of years of my life focusing on the future and not paying a lot of attention to the present. I talked about how I gave myself permission to spend nearly $5k on grills and started planning a huge Disney trip. I’m happy to report the trip was amazing (and exhausting), and since buying those grills I’ve hosted dozens of events at my house and introduced tons of people to the wonders of smoked meat.
Today I learned about the provisional life. This is a topic that Jung talked about a lot (not that I knew that until this morning). In modern day psychology, it’s sometimes called Peter Pan Syndrome. As Marie-Louise von Franz explained it:
There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found.
Put another way, you believe you are living a prelude to an idyllic future that is often just a mirage. The prelude is your real life, and when you finally reach the mirage you realize it is your death.
Something that comes up often in the FIRE world is that when someone is in “the boring middle,” the time of a person’s financial independence journey when there are no more debts to pay off and no more challenges other than saving and waiting, they lose sight of the fact that the time between now and the day they reach financial independence is their life. This is the concept that Die with Zero drives home so well. Or for a more Stoic approach, yesterday is gone, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, all that exists is now.
As Die with Zero made me question my spending (or lack thereof) habits, the concept of provisional life has had me questioning so many other actions in my life. For example, our kids are 7, 6 and 4, and we often talk about how we’ll do something when the youngest is just a little older. We’ll go out to dinner more when he’s older and we can leave them with a babysitter. We’ll go on a Caribbean vacation when he’s just a little older. We’ll fly more places when we can rent a car without needing booster seats.
Well, as it turns out, my youngest will probably be in booster seats until I’m 51. We take beach vacations right here at home, and could just as easily fly to the Caribbean with a 4 year old. And babysitters may be unqualified to put three kids to bed and cost way too much, but my relationship with my wife will only get stale if we keep putting it off.
I’ll start a business when work isn’t crazy and the kids don’t have so much going on. I’ll finish that personal finance book after the holidays when I can really concentrate. I know I’m not happy with my job right now, but it’ll get better when we hear our new priorities in January. These are some of the illusions I’ve been telling myself about for months. I already have a note hanging above my monitor that says “The best writer who has never written a book.” I really enjoy picking on myself. Even my FI journey and focus on the time when I can retire is an example of provisional living.
As part of writing this I looked at ways to deal with thoughts of provisional living, but honestly couldn’t find much. As a rational person, I have to believe that recognizing the illusions I’ve created and focusing on what I can do today rather than what I think life will be like in the future is the cure. If I’m already hyper aware that the future is not guaranteed, and I know that these ideas are illusions if I don’t put in work to bring them about or change them, they should cease to be illusions provided I continue to take steps to bring them about.
Have you heard of provisional living before? Are there examples from your own life where you catch yourself doing this?
Freed by 50 