What Shines in the Future

A small touch of the blues on the highway.

For no reason. Nothing hurting. No new abyss in my life. Nothing that should worry me more than usual.

Then I understood: nothing exciting was waiting for me in Paris. Not when I arrived, not that evening, not in the week ahead. Not an unpleasant week coming up – not at all – but nothing I was looking forward to.

Which made me realize two things.

The first: my happiness depends almost entirely on anticipating happiness to come.

Something has to be shining in my future.

Either a small spark in my immediate future: a pastry, a meeting, a distraction. Or a big sun in my distant future: the success of a long-term project, a life change, the promise of a brighter tomorrow.

Strangely, the actual size of the star doesn't matter, only its apparent size. If it's small, it has to be close – I want it now. If it's far away, it has to be big – worth the wait. So its diameter, seen from the present, always stays roughly the same: I need a certain amount of brightness on the horizon.

This way of seeing things helps explain certain behaviors, I think.

People with no long-term prospects, for example, those who have lost faith in the future (who have no distant sun), often make up for it with a multitude of short-term sparks. That's the first step toward addiction: wallowing in immediate pleasures to forget the lack of an overall direction.

Conversely, it's easier to keep up a discipline day after day when you're aiming for a dazzling light on the horizon. The reward shining in the distance makes the daily sacrifices easier to bear.

And that was exactly it: in the car, nothing was shining. And I felt... weary. Listless. Almost depressed. That was the second realization:

What if this is my baseline? My emotional resting state?

Is the state I call "depressed" actually my "everything's fine" state, which I misread because I depend too much on the future?

Have I become like an addict too obsessed with his next fix to notice the sources of joy right in front of him? Do I really need a reward on the horizon to enjoy the moment? Is it possible that I've organized my life (and for how long?) so that I'm always waiting for something, even if I have to make it up? Even if it means spoiling what's here and now? Have fantasies of what's coming dulled my palate to the subtler emotions within reach?

But above all: can I recalibrate my brain to be less hypnotized by the future and the junk it keeps dangling in front of me?

(Answer: yes, very easily. Bisou.)