Stop Saving Your Life for “Someday” — It’s Already Here
The letter arrived on a Wednesday, formal and final: my college friend David had died suddenly of a heart attack at forty-one. As I read the funeral details, I remembered our last conversation six months earlier. “We should get together soon,” I had said. “Absolutely,” he had replied. “Someday soon.”
Someday had run out without either of us noticing.
I spent that afternoon taking inventory of my own someday account and discovered I was bankrupt. The book I would someday write. The trip to Italy I would someday take. The guitar lessons I would someday restart. The difficult conversation with my brother I would someday initiate. The career change I would someday make. Decades of promises to a future self that had assumed time was an inexhaustible resource rather than a dwindling currency.
When did I become so wealthy in somedays that I could spend them carelessly? When did tomorrow become more real to me than today?
Someday is the most seductive lie we tell ourselves. It offers all the comfort of having a plan with none of the discomfort of execution. Someday I’ll be braver, more disciplined, more ready. Someday the timing will be perfect, the obstacles will clear, the stars will align in configurations more favorable to change.
But someday is not a when—it’s a where. It’s the place we banish our deepest desires so we don’t have to confront our current limitations. It’s the psychological equivalent of a storage unit where we keep all the lives we might live, all the people we might become, all the experiences we might have if we were different people living different lives in different circumstances.
The cruelest arithmetic of someday is that it seems to multiply while it actually diminishes. Every someday spent becomes a someday lost. Every postponement of the someday dream moves it further from today’s reality. The book unsunny becomes harder to write as the idea ages. The trip untaken becomes more complicated as responsibilities accumulate. The conversation unavoided becomes more difficult as silence calcifies into distance.
But we continue to live as if someday were a renewable resource, as if the future offered infinite opportunities to become the people we imagine we might be. We treat our deepest aspirations like savings bonds that will mature at some undefined future date, not realizing that their value decreases with every year we don’t cash them in.
David and I had been friends since college, bonded by late-night conversations about books we wanted to write, places we wanted to see, the mark we wanted to leave on the world. We were going to stay close, going to visit regularly, going to be the kind of friends who didn’t let distance or busy careers diminish what we’d shared.
Instead, we became curators of our own nostalgia, people who loved the idea of our friendship more than we invested in its reality. We traded regular connection for the promise of someday reconnection, actual presence for the fantasy of future presence.
The funeral was full of people with similar stories. David’s someday novel, half-finished in a desk drawer. His someday plans to travel, detailed itineraries never booked. His someday intentions to spend more time with his aging parents, visits postponed for weekends that never came.
We had all been saving our real lives for later, as if there were a special occasion coming that would justify the risk of actually living fully, boldly, immediately.
But what if someday is already here? What if the perfect timing we’re waiting for is just another word for courage we haven’t mustered? What if the life we’re preparing to live is the life we’re already living, just without the commitment to fully inhabit it?
I think of all the somedays I’ve squandered—not on laziness or procrastination, but on the assumption that the best version of my life was always just around the corner, that today was just preparation for the real living that would begin when conditions improved.
The book I would someday write needs to be started today with imperfect sentences. The relationship I would someday repair needs today’s difficult phone call. The adventure I would someday take needs today’s reservation, today’s commitment, today’s first step toward making fantasy into plan and plan into reality.
Because David’s sudden absence taught me something I should have learned decades ago: someday is not guaranteed. Someday might never come. Someday is a luxury that requires the one thing we can never earn more of—time.
Tonight I’m making a list—not of things I’ll do someday, but of things I’ll do tomorrow. Real dates, specific actions, concrete steps toward the life I’ve been saving for a someday that, it turns out, was supposed to be today all along.
The bankruptcy of someday is total, but the assets can be liquidated immediately. The only question is whether we have the courage to spend them while they still have value.
Someday is over. Today is all we’ve ever actually had.