In a matter of 10 days, I went from sending a single cold email, to a $150,000 job offer. The craziest and most heartbreaking part is, I turned the offer down.

I’ve been guessing and seconding guessing that decision on repeat for the past few days.

When I’m in the shower, when I’m at the gym, and even while spending time with family. In the background of my mind, I’m running a loop. A simulation of the life I could have had. Envisioning the possibilities I had given up, and the missteps I may have made along the way.

It’s almost as if I’m watching another version of me.

And it’s as if, I’m watching him die.

Your first death

If I had to guess, the first time you watched a version of yourself die, was when you internalized that you’d never become a professional athlete.

A delusion that nearly all of us shared as kids.

Whether it was stadiums cheering our names, or making the olympic team, we all dreamed of being great athletes1. But one day, a coach, or a family member, or a close friend, sat you down and gave you the honest truth. It was just never gonna happen.

In vivid detail, you watched as the rich, sculpted, and beloved version of yourself slipped away.

You watched a version of yourself die.

Your second most memorable death might’ve been when you and your high school sweetheart broke up. Or maybe when you realized you’d never get into your dream school.

And that was just the beginning. The older you got, the more of these little deaths you experienced. Each one of them followed a similar trajectory. A glorious expectation, a disappointing fall, and protracted pain.

Why do we create these worlds

We create imaginary worlds to give texture to our goals.

The goal of being a millionaire is great, but it’s not very compelling.

Instead, what if you clearly saw yourself—swinging in a hammock just a few feet above the white sand beaches of Tahiti. You take one last sip of your tropical cocktail, before popping the orange garnish in your mouth with a juicy crunch. Looking down, you check your brand new Rolex watch. Yup it’s 11am on a Tuesday, and you have absolutely no one telling you what to do.

The first is simply the goal having a million dollars. The second is a world you created to give texture to that goal. It’s a vision of what your life will be like when you achieve it.

Fear and Wonder

Two forces drive us to create fictitious worlds: Fear and wonder.

Fear is the neurotic force that keeps us on our toes. It has us looking around corners and planning contingencies. Fear helps us prepare for the unknown. It helps us build a detailed map of what the future might look like.

And then there’s wonder.

Wonder pushes us to not only imagine the gold medal around our neck, but the sports car in our driveway. The Michelin star dinners, the admiration, the gifts, and the status. Wonder helps us craft the ornate details of our fictitious worlds.

But what’s the purpose?

Creating these imaginary worlds—these possible futures—pulls us forward. They drive us towards a better life, rather than simply enjoying the guaranteed present. They make us believe that there is something better just ahead.

Fictitious worlds drive progress.

They don’t however, drive happiness.

This is probably going to end badly

Fictitious worlds are realized in two different ways.

The first is a cataclysmic death. 

When we conceptualize our future selves, and the worlds they live in, we’re drawing on a limited set of information. We’re making guesses to fill in the details we don’t quite know yet. When a critical mistake is made in this guessing process—or a new piece of information is revealed to us—the entire world we created collapses in on itself.

For example, having your doctor deliver the news that you’re infertile, instantly destroys the dreams that you’ve manufactured about conceiving children2.

The grief you’ll experience from witnessing the collapse of this fictitious world will be swift, and immense.

The second is a slow disintegration.

Unlike the the first example, sometimes we actually make it across the finish line. We achieve our goals. We end up on the private island, snag a beautiful spouse, and land the dream job.

However there’s a catch.

The particularities of the fantasy worlds we create will always be different than our ultimate reality. All those textural elements we devised to motivate ourselves towards our goals, never feel quite as great as we thought they would.

It’s like spending 10 years in medical school, only to realize that your intrinsic desire to help people isn’t as high as you previously imagined. What you really valued most is normal working hours, and making it home in time for dinner each night3.

The sad reality is, creating fictitious worlds will always end in despair because our expectations will always be rosier than reality. We simply can’t guess the future with perfect accuracy.

How to use your imagination the right way

Attaching ourselves to fictitious worlds, is a bit like buying pastries at Starbucks. We know it’ll never taste as good as it looks, but we just can’t help ourselves.

What we can do, however, is change how we envision our future. This requires us to pull back the veil of our self deceit, by realizing two critical faults in our thinking.

First, when we construct a fantasy, we almost always skew towards the positive. We build a beautiful world where we’re happy, and healthy, and socially thriving. After all, the purpose of these visions is to inspire us towards action. Therefore, the rosier the the better.

As a result, our imagination tactfully leaves out anything that might assuage us from this pursuit. Things like, dissatisfaction, regret, and malaise. All of which play a central role in our reality, and yet, are conveniently absent from our fantasies.

The realization that our lives will not be better in the future—just different—is something we need to constantly remind ourselves.

The second thing that needs to be considered is that you must make sacrifices in order to reach this imagined future. If you’re set on becoming a surgeon, you’ll need to sacrifice a lot of time with your family. However, your imagination likes to artfully leave this fact out of the equation.

The thing about your imagined self is they always get the best of both worlds. They get to keep all the things you love about your present day life, while leading radically different lives in the future.

Your future self has it all, and that’s a dead giveaway that they’re a baseless fiction. 

The numbers change, but the feeling stays the same

Here’s a personal aside that will help illustrate the final point:

Eight years ago, I was making $35,000 a year selling shoes.

Just enough to make ends meet, and I was content. I couldn’t really complain about much. I had a lovely spouse, a nice apartment, and a handful of incredible friends. The best part was I got to sell sneakers instead of working nights flipping burgers. All in all, life was good.

Today, I’m making $55,000 a year with my own business.

I work one day per week, and have enough of a safety net to keep doing this for the next two years. I’m not crushing it, but I’m making ends meet. I can’t really complain about much. I have a lovely spouse, a nice apartment, and a handful of incredible friends. The best part is I get to be my own boss, instead of having to work a 9-5. All in all, life is good…

This brings me to the final tool we can use to blunt the sting of watching our future selves die. That is, although the numbers may change, the way we feel largely stays the same. 

Despite what our imaginations may lead us to believe, we are not happier in the future. Nor are we more sad. In general, we’re going to feel relatively similar to the way we feel now.

What I’ve come to realize is that people who were happy when they were poor, tend to be happy when they’re rich. And people who were sad when they’re poor, tend to be sad when they’re rich. This not only applies to money, but experience, relationships, knowledge, power, and status as well.

By reflecting on how radically our circumstances have changed in the past—and how we’ve remained relatively unchanged despite this—we can begin to sculpt a more accurate representation of our future. 

We can begin to disassociate from the imaginary versions of ourselves, and realize that the things to come will not be better, or worse, they’ll simply be different.

—Zac