Do you plan for the future?

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A few weeks ago I was talking to someone about that same topic. I dunno...when I was younger I had plans for the future. But I was in my twenties, & healthier. Now I'm heading into middle age, feel like I'm old as hell & frankly, I've had my plans derailed--& seen those of others derailed--so often that I am convinced that most of us simply do not have the power to crush any opposition & put our plans into effect. The only exceptions to this are the top 7% or so of the population: They were born into money, went to the best schools, & know how to leverage their resources to get more of what they want.

One reply in here mentioned fear of the future as an obstacle to making plans. I'm a bit different. As far as my life is concerned, I don't fear the future...I loathe it.
 
I used to plan for the future... I had so many plans for the future. But life gets in the way. Now, I can't even plan for tomorrow. I will just let things be.....
 
^^ Very similar to me. I used to plan for the future, then everything except one major thing flat on it's face. Now I plan a little for certain things I do have some control over (and even then there are no certainties), but most of the time now I am just grateful for what I have and just go with the flow and make the best of every situation, and give it my all.
 
At the moment and the last few years, I live one month at a time. It's a struggle enough just making sure there is time for everything I need to do and the kids' schedules, I can't look beyond more than that. BUT, that will be changing soon, so I'll let you know. lol
 
I used to have a plan, a plan b, a plan c, a plan d and others nice plans.
But once they all failed, I didn't have a plan for what happened. I gave up the plans that moment. Too many variables for now and I'm bad in predicting things.
 
I don't now as I am older set in mind any future plans, but I do have hopes and dreams. If they happen great, if they don't then I am not really let down.
 
Sometimes I think future plans me.
If you plan future long, future also plans you:rolleyes:
 
I don't plan for the future as much as I should, but I'm trying to change that.

When I was growing up, I kind of just went through the motions of life. I assumed that everything would just keep going, as it was, and that all I had to do was keep doing what I'd been doing, and everything would fall into place in time.

Then I fell off the path freshman year of college, when I started thinking that the world was going to run out of oil, and that the end of modern civilization was going to happen within my lifetime. I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to get everything I thought I'd been going for. So I gave up on life, because I didn't care about/didn't want the world we would be left with after oil ran out. I didn't want to live in a permanently pre-industrial world. And I thought I probably wouldn't survive anyway, since I thought most people would be killed off by violence, disease, medical problems that would be easily preventable in the modern world but disastrous in the pre-industrial world, or starvation. Eventually, the peak oil fear started to fade away, but then I thought that the recession would be forever, and inflation would make it impossible to live a life that used to be considered normal, and I took in all the doom and gloom in the news about how my generation was f*cked. So I was still giving up on life, I just changed the reason for it.

Then, I got off the rails on anti-capitalism. It took me way off course in life. I didn't want to work for someone else, and I thought as long as I worked for someone else, I could never be happy, so I didn't plan my life because I thought I wasn't going to be happy anyway so there was no point. But I didn't think about that to work for yourself, you have to be good at something, which I've always struggled with.

Then I gave up on life because I thought that it didn't matter what kind of life I had, as long as I was a boring person (and therefore single because I couldn't impress/interest anyone, and was stuck in a life I hated/was bored with), which I felt doomed to be, because I thought I lacked genetic talent and an unconventional enough mind, to be someone I actually like being, and to be interesting to anyone. I am still struggling with this one, and looking back I suppose I always have struggled with it. I guess this is my main battle in life.

Now I'm trying to plan for the future more, because clearly the approach I took all my life, has never worked - otherwise I'd have what I want already or at least be on my way - and it's why I've never been happy.

If I never got into all the nonsense - germophobia, peak oil, the recession/inflation/doom and gloom news, anti-capitalism, hating "bad boys", these obsessions that seemed to come one after the other - and stuck to the original plan of being an accountant because it was the thing I could do that made the most money - I would have been in a much better place than this.

However, I still would have had to struggle with the "being a boring person, and probably single because of it" and "not liking myself because I feel genetically untalented and too dull/conventional". I guess that has been my real battle, this whole time.
 
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I have saved/invested enough for the future.
But that was merely incidental. Contributing a certain amount a month to my portfolio and IRA.
I don't plan and never have.
I'm a reactive kind of guy.
I have no idea what the future holds for me.
But whatever it is, I'll react to what comes at me.
 

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