Most of us are not actually living the lives we chose.
That sounds dramatic when you read it the first time...it isn't, really. It's just the math.
By the time we were old enough to think about what kind of life we wanted, we had already absorbed thirty thousand opinions about what a good life looked like. From parents, teachers, neighbours, the kids we grew up next to, movies, commercials, the whole machinery of family and school and culture running in the background of every childhood.
Get the education. Get the credential. Get the job. Buy the house. Find someone. Have the kids. Stack the milestones. The good life follows.
By the time we noticed any of it, if we ever did, it had been running for decades and was indistinguishable from our own thinking.
That's the script.
The script doesn't feel like a script when we're inside it. It feels like life. Like the natural order of things. Like a series of choices we're making, freshly, every day.
Most of those choices are not actually fresh. They're the script running, again, the way it has been running for years. We do the thing we were going to do anyway, and we tell ourselves we chose it.
This is what autopilot actually means. Not the daydreaming-while-driving sense. The deeper one. Living a life shaped by rules we did not write, beliefs we don't really question, taking in things we did not select, sprinting toward outcomes we never stopped long enough to decide on. Do I really want or need this? And why?
The strange part is that the autopilot life can look completely fine from the outside. Some of them look enviable. The cost is something quieter. It shows up in the gap between what's happening and what would have been happening if we had been paying attention and chose differently. The conversation we did not have because the script did not leave room for it. The decade we spent climbing a ladder because we'd been told the climb was the point (or because that's what everyone does), and the question of whether we wanted to be at the top of that particular ladder did not surface until the climb was nearly done. Once on top, looking down and thinking, perhaps this ladder was leaning against the wrong wall...by then it's almost too late.
In 1845, Thoreau walked into the woods, lived in a small cabin he built himself, and stayed for two years. He wrote a book about it. The most quoted line from that book is the one we should sit with the longest:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau · Walden, "Economy" · 1854
He wasn't being mean about it when he wrote that. He was being honest. Most people, he was observing, were living lives they hadn't really chosen, on terms they hadn't really set, hoping somewhere along the way it would start to feel like theirs. It usually didn't.
His own words for why he went:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau · Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" · 1854
He didn't go to escape. He went to find out what was actually his, underneath everything that had been handed to him. Separate from all the external, material people, places, things.
You don't have to go to the woods.
You don't have to quit your job, leave your city, or throw out the script. The script is not going anywhere. It's been running for decades, and it knows how to argue for itself. What you can do is start watching it. The same way we noticed thoughts in the last piece. Without arguing. Without trying to win.
Notice the assumption you don't remember choosing. Notice the ambition that doesn't actually belong to you. Notice the thing you keep telling yourself you want because you've been told you should want it. Notice the version of yourself you've been performing.
Most people who actually shift their lives don't do it by throwing everything out. They do it by stepping back, getting better at seeing what's running, day by day, and choosing where to push back.
The script keeps running. That's the point.
We don't get free of it. We get the ability to see it and choose against it, when we want to, again and again, with increasing speed.
Taran · Ontario, Canada