Thanun Buranapong via Unsplash

I was sick this week.  It started with a head cold and turned into a nasty stomach bug that left me totally incapacitated for 24 hours.  At the worst of it, I remember feeling like I had been sick forever and that I would likely never NOT be sick again.  This would be my world, forever and always.  Obviously, exhaustion and discomfort were skewing reason and my sense of proportion.  But I think there’s also a bigger psychological effect at play.

We humans, as a whole, assume that the person we are today is the person we will be for the rest of our lives.  Researchers call it the “end of history illusion”.  We see the present as the culmination of everything that led up to it (which, I suppose, technically it is) but, more significantly, we tend to underestimate how much we will change in the future.  As a result, TODAY always seems more significant and more permanent than any other day.

This is why early in our careers (or at any stage, really) a bad job can be so gut-wrenchingly painful.  If everything we’ve done to date has gotten us here, and here kind of sucks, what does that say about our lives?  It can feel like everything has been a waste.  And, because it’s so hard to imagine how much we will change in the future, we don’t see the way out and beat ourselves up for not having met our full potential.

Why do we do this to ourselves??  We don’t look around us and berate our friends because they haven’t found their dream jobs.  We accept that they just haven’t found the right fit yet and we still see the potential in their future.  But do we offer ourselves that same kindness?  Rarely.

So how do we get past it?  We remind ourselves that this “now” is simply an experience that will create the next “now” and the “now” after that.  We remain driven and intentional about the future, but give ourselves a break when we get stuck.  This day, this job, this YOU is merely one plot point in the whole story, not the final page of the book.