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I’m 46 Years Old and I Have No Goals

What life feels like at the end of your to-do list.

Vanessa Torre
5 min readJul 12, 2020
Photo by Eternal Happiness via Pexels

It’s Sunday morning. I’m sitting at my countertop having a cup of coffee. I watered my plants, made breakfast, and did a load of laundry. This is my day. I have nothing else to do.

A few weeks ago I checked off the last few things I had to do on my to-do list. I am now on autopilot. This would make some people feel horribly uncomfortable. I feel fantastic.

My life has been controlled by a series of spreadsheets. I am a planner at heart and I like charting things out. I have spent years crunching numbers and creating scenarios to get me where I wanted to be.

Of course, the destination of where I wanted to be has changed about a half a dozen times in the last 25 years. The idea of what it would feel like when I got there has also changed.

Like every other warm-blooded human being, I had this list of everything I needed to do or make happen so that I could be happy. We create the list with a vision of happiness in mind and push ourselves to keep moving forward. Onward. Upward. Forever forward.

The danger of the “I’ll be happy when…” list is that we can always find something else to add. We run the risk of never quite being satisfied. What is in front of us is no longer…

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Vanessa Torre
Vanessa Torre

Written by Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com

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