prickly oxheart

What if This is it?

There's something almost obscene about our relationship with missing out. We've turned it into performance art. We catalog everything we're not doing, not having, not becoming. As if absence were a currency we could spend on anything meaningful.

The cruelest joke is that missing out isn't an actual problem. The problem is how we've weaponized it against our own human experience. We stand ankle-deep in the river, refusing to notice the water because somewhere upstream there might be a waterfall. We've become surveyors of our own dehydration.

I watch people scroll through lives they're not living, amassing evidence of their own incompleteness. The investment they didn’t make. The startup they didn’t join. The newsletter they didn’t start, the career pivot, the relationship that might have been different. We've turned existence into an infinite ramble of inadequacy, each swipe an attempted assassination of the present moment.

But here's what no one wants to admit: what you have right now was probably perfect all along. Not because it's objectively the best thing available, but because it chose you. In this moment. With your particular hunger, your way of reaching, your exact capacity to receive what's being offered.

The mythology of missing out assumes there's a correct life somewhere else — a parallel version where you made better choices, accumulated more meaningful experiences, found the optimal path through the maze of possibility. This is magical thinking disguised as aspiration. It's the belief that life is a multiple-choice exam and you must to select the correct answers.

What if missing out isn't a failure of optimisation but a condition of being human? What if the very fact that we cannot have everything is what makes anything matter at all? Scarcity isn't always the enemy of meaning — it's the condition that can make meaning possible.

There's a particular satisfaction that comes from fully metabolizing your choices instead of treating them like hors d'oeuvre before real choices. When you stop serving your life up for imaginary approval by Michelin inspectors, something shifts. The meal you're eating becomes food instead of a placeholder for a full meal. The work you're doing becomes participation instead of preparation for more meaningful work.

There's a violence in the way we abandon our own experiences in pursuit of theoretically superior ones. It's not just inefficient — it's a form of self-abandonment. Every time you reject what's actually happening because it doesn't match your mental image of what should be happening, you're telling yourself that your real life isn't worth participating in.

The most radical thing you can do in a culture obsessed with optimisation is to fully occupy your own choices. To be here instead of somewhere else. To do this instead of something better. To be satisfied with enough instead of always reaching for more.

This isn't resignation. It's rebellion. It's a refusal to treat your life like a rough draft, like preparation for the real thing that's always just around the corner. It's an insistence that this moment — this imperfect, incomplete, thoroughly ordinary moment — is worthy of your full attention.

Missing out is inevitable. You will never read all the books, visit all the places, have all the experiences that seem important from a distance. But the fear of missing out can consume every experience you actually have, turning your life into a moodboard of things you were too distracted to enjoy.

The alternative isn't to stop wanting things or to settle for less. The alternative is to let satisfaction happen. To notice when you're holding something real and stop looking over your shoulder. To trust that your hunger will guide you to what you need, but only if you're present enough to taste it fully.

Ask yourself:

What if this is it?

Not as defeat — but as invitation.

What if this version of your life, unpolished and unvalidated, is the one asking to be lived?

Not optimised. Not upgraded. Just inhabited.

What if what you need isn’t hiding somewhere in the future, but waiting here — in the part of your life you keep treating like a dry run?

Your life is not a strategy. It's not a performance to be optimised or an exam with right answers. It's an experience to be had, right here, with whatever is in front of you, worthy of your attention precisely because it's yours.

#The Wanting Trap #Without the Cushion