Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

This week’s question comes, as always, from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions — and it arrives as something of a follow-up to last week’s question about regrets and hypothetical deathbed inventories. If last week’s question asked you to look backward, this week’s turns you around and points you at the horizon.

Ready? Here it is:

Do you try to envision your future and live now as you think you’ll one day wish you had?

Take a breath. Read it again if you need to. I’ll wait.

Okay. So. About that.

The Honest Answer

No.

I mean — not really. Not in any consistent, intentional way. Not in the way the question implies, which carries a certain energy to it, a very “live with purpose and intention” kind of energy. The kind of thing that looks great on a motivational poster or sandwiched between two sunrise photos on an Instagram reel. Live today as your future self will thank you for. Very inspirational. Very shareable. Not especially descriptive of how I actually move through my days.

I am, at my core, a present-tense person. I live here, in the now, in the current moment, in whatever is directly in front of me. Long-term goals have always been a little elusive for me — and I say this as someone who has, at various points, been asked by employers to articulate a five-year vision for myself, which is an exercise I find about as natural as being asked to describe a color I’ve never seen. I can do it. I can produce the words. But they don’t always feel like they’re coming from somewhere real.

This isn’t something I’m entirely proud of. But it’s true, and we’re doing the honest version here.

The Contradiction I Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where it gets interesting — or at least where I started getting uncomfortable when I actually sat with this question.

I plan my blog posts weeks, sometimes months, in advance. This post, which you are reading on May 23, was written on April 21. That’s over a month of lead time on a Question of the Week post, which is not exactly a breaking news item. The A to Z Challenge posts I published this past April? Written well ahead of the month. My Movie Monday entries? Queued up. I have a spreadsheet — an actual Excel file — with hundreds of blog topic ideas stretching out into the next decade. I know roughly what I want to be writing about in 2028. I have thoughts about 2030.

So apparently I can think about the future. I just have to be thinking about the blog.

When it comes to my creative life — the writing, the content, the sprawling, decades-long project that is The Confusing Middle — future Aaron is very much accounted for. I’ve got plans for him. I know what he’s going to be doing, at least in broad strokes. I’m building something I intend to still be building for a long time.

But ask me where I see myself personally in five years? Blank. Ask me what I’m working toward beyond the next post, the next book, the next thing? Considerably less blank, but only barely.

I’m not sure what to do with that gap. It’s a little too on-the-nose to ignore.

The Part Where Being 46 Comes Into It

Last week I talked about what ifs and emotional fortifications and the slow construction project that is a life lived mostly inside one’s own head. This week’s question forces a slightly different angle on some of the same territory.

Because here’s the thing about being 46: statistically speaking, I am now, in all likelihood, in the second half of my life. I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me. That’s not morbid — or at least I’m trying not to let it be morbid — but it is just math. And math has a way of making certain questions feel more urgent than they did at 26 or 36.

And yet I wonder sometimes if that awareness — of being past the midpoint, of having fewer pages left in the chapter than I might have expected — is actually part of why I don’t spend a lot of time envisioning the future. Not avoidance exactly. More like… a quiet acknowledgment that none of it is guaranteed anyway. Not one of us is promised tomorrow. I know that sounds like another Instagram caption, but I mean it in a more lived-in way. Spending a lot of energy projecting forward feels, sometimes, like building furniture for a house you’re not sure you’ll still be in.

So I stay here. In the present. In the thing that’s in front of me right now.

Whether that’s wisdom or just a very sophisticated form of not dealing with things, I genuinely cannot tell you. Maybe both. Probably both.

The Exception That Matters

I said I don’t really live with an eye toward how I’ll wish I had. But that’s not entirely true, and I should be honest about the exception.

Over roughly the last year or so, I’ve worked harder on my writing than I have in a long time. Fiction. Non-fiction. Things that have been rattling around in my head for years and that I kept promising myself I’d get to eventually. Last week I mentioned the blank pages that stayed blank for too long, the books I wanted to write that I kept deferring. Well. I have been un-deferring them. I haven’t landed a literary agent or signed with a traditional publisher — that part of the dream is still very much a work in progress — but I’ve published a few things through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which is a real thing that exists in the real world, which is more than I could say a couple of years ago.

And I think what pushed me toward that wasn’t a five-year plan. It wasn’t a vision board or a goal-setting exercise or a very productive therapy session. It was, honestly, something closer to the spirit of this question — a low-level awareness that I’d been saying later for too long, and that later had a way of quietly becoming never if you weren’t paying attention.

So maybe I do live with some version of this question operating in the background. Not loudly. Not in a way I could articulate to a career counselor. But somewhere underneath the day-to-day, there’s something that occasionally taps me on the shoulder and says, hey, remember that thing you actually want? Maybe don’t keep putting that off.

I’m trying to listen to it more.

The Instagram Version vs. The Real Version

The question, as written, has a certain aspirational quality to it. Do you live now as you’ll one day wish you had? It implies a clear-eyed, purposeful relationship with your own future — the idea that you can see the person you’re becoming and make daily choices that honor that vision.

And for some people, that’s real. That’s genuinely how they’re wired. I admire it, honestly. I just don’t think it’s me.

For me, it’s less about a coherent vision of the future and more about a handful of things I know I’d regret leaving undone — and a slowly improving track record of actually doing them instead of talking about doing them. The blog. The books. The stories I want to tell. The posts I want to write. The ideas in that Excel spreadsheet that may or may not still be relevant in 2031 but that I’m going to work my way toward anyway, because what else are you going to do?

I can’t see ten years down the road clearly. But I can see the next thing. And the next thing after that. And I’m learning, gradually, that for someone like me, that might be enough.

Your Turn

I’m curious how this one lands for you. Are you a future-envisioner — someone who carries a mental picture of where you’re headed and actually uses it to navigate your present? Or are you more like me, living mostly in the current moment, with the future showing up as a vague shape in the periphery rather than a destination on a map?

And does the question feel hopeful to you, or does it feel like pressure? Because I think there’s a version of it that functions as genuine motivation, and a version that just makes you feel behind. I’m not always sure which version I’m reading.

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’ll be here, present-tense as ever, probably already thinking about next week’s post.

Until then — this is Aaron, still here at The Confusing Middle, living mostly in the now, with one eye on the spreadsheet.