We Were Taught to Live on Hold
From childhood we're told 'just wait until…' — and we keep waiting. But waiting never ends.
We were taught from childhood to live for the next milestone.
I’ve been planning to move to the suburbs for a while now.
Not because city life is unbearable, but because I’ve always believed that once I got there, I could finally start living the life I want. Quieter, slower, and—yes, that’s the word—more “right.”
But one day, a thought hit me:
The way I’m waiting for the suburbs is structurally identical to the way I wait for my career to stabilize, for my finances to loosen up, for one thing to wrap up before another begins.
I’ve been postponing one thing. That thing isn’t the move. That thing is: starting to live.
This realization made me uncomfortable. Because it means that even after I move, I might be waiting out there for something else—for the room to be arranged, for the surroundings to grow quieter, for some vague “feeling right” I can’t articulate.
The postponement itself follows me.
I tried to trace where this habit came from.
One scene comes to mind, though I suspect it’s not unique to me.
As kids, adults would say, “You’ll feel better once you grow up,” “You’ll relax after the exams,” “You’ll be set when you land a job.” Every present moment was a bridge to the next “when.” We were never taught that the current state could have value in itself. We were only taught: “You’re not enough yet—meet this condition, and then you’ll count.”
So I learned one thing: to always place “starting” after the next milestone.
This isn’t laziness. It isn’t procrastination. It’s something deeper—a sense that “the current me doesn’t deserve to start yet.”
I haven’t reached a certain position, so my efforts don’t count. I’m not in a certain state, so starting now would be wasteful. I haven’t arrived somewhere, so the real feeling hasn’t descended.
I always believed that signal would be waiting for me somewhere.
It wasn’t until I thought of Thoreau that I realized: maybe that signal was never supposed to be an answer.
He went to Walden Pond with a question—he wanted to know what remained after stripping away everything unnecessary. And that question, he already had it before he went.
Later, I thought: I also have a question I want to live into and test.
If I move to the suburbs, it won’t be because the place will give me something. It will be because that’s where I choose to test this question.