Before I dive into a million random topics, we should probably address the big old obvious starting point:
It’s somehow a new year, again.
It fucks me up every single time. A year full of new opportunities, new possibilities and new dreams.
Sounds a little bit much, doesn’t it? The perpetual pressure to have the best year yet. To constantly up the past 12 months, like an insane battle between yourself and the insatiable need to always be ‘improving’. But improving what? If I actually write down everything I want to achieve this year, it’s got nothing to do with self-improvement, in the traditional sense at least. And it very much doesn’t take into account the fact that I don’t have a safe full of gold blocks to bankroll my made-up life, there’s no real acknowledgement I have a tiresome 9-5 that gets in the way of pretty much all my creativity or will to be productive or the fact that I am fairly certain the world isn’t set up to support the average Joe reaching peak happiness.
I just made my goals for 2024 sound as if I have the most egregious, ostentatious, out-of-this-world ideas. I don’t really; I just want to travel the entire world, quit my job and live in the mountains, become a travel writer who gets paid to jet-set and I want the world to love me just for me.
Kidding!
Jokes aside, I do want to create a life this year that is less about the noise and more about living, ya know? As I get older I care less and less about the things I am supposed to care about. I don’t want a four-bed house and a new car on the driveway. I don’t want to climb the career ladder and spend even more time looking at a screen, constantly expressing to my team with genuine angst ‘WE MUST INCREASE ROI’. I don’t want a household full of children, not even one. I don’t want any of it.
I want to climb mountains. I want to learn to paint with watercolours. I want to do a black run on my mountain bike. Jump in waterfalls even if it’s two degrees. Fly to remote places and sleep under the stars. See every sunrise that sets the sky on fire and somehow become the kind of person who can wake up in time to witness it. I don’t want to live every week wishing away the hours until Friday at 5 pm and then fight the existential dread that weighs heavy on my chest from about 2 pm on Sunday.
Basically, I want a life where I feel like I can breathe and just be.
It’s all a little wishy-washy but also deadly serious rolled into one. So, I decided to summarise all the above, the hopes and dreams, the outlandish goal to just be free and reworked it into something a little more manageable:
‘Do more stupid shit and laugh a lot more.’
And that’s that I guess. Let’s see how it goes.
LJ x
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