When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?
Put another way, if you have an extra hour tomorrow with nothing planned, what could you do with yourself to later say: I’m glad I did that? What if you have an unplanned day? Or a week? Does how you use that time change? Would the choice of how to use that time be more or less deliberate, depending on how long you have? Does that choice define you as a person?
I figured out how to escape others' expectations and assumptions about how I ought to live. I did more of what I wanted and less of what other people wanted me to do.
When I had more, I gave more. When I had less, others helped me.
This sounds really good to me. How did you escape others’ expectations?
Some of it was open contrarianism. No wedding, no kids, no car, all on principle. This was a way to refuse to live by someone else's script. I/we didn't need these things, so I/we opted out.
Some of it was fear of despair. My mom died a wage slave of a heart attack on the job. I was not going to let that happen to me, so I learned about personal finance and learned about refusing to live by the standard script of buying what I couldn't afford, keeping up with the Joneses, and so on. This also meant leaving the big city. It also informed the decisions about wedding, kids, and car.
Some of it was metta meditation. As I learned to have compassion for others, I learned to see their expectations of me as regrets about themselves. This made it easier to consciously ignore them.
Ultimately I learned to pay attention to every time I thought about what I "should" or "ought to do" and challenged myself to find a reason to do that thing that felt genuine to me. Did I really need to? What bad thing would happen if I didn't? Would I truly value it? And when this led me to find no genuine, compelling reason, I didn't do it. I became allergic, in a sense, to "because I'm supposed to".
I'm not sure whether that actually explains anything, but it's what I can offer for now. Further questions are welcome.
This resonated so much with me. I am nearly 40 and have spent far too much of my life obligated to others and not setting healthy boundaries. And of course, now that I've realized that and started setting stronger boundaries with people about what they may and may not demand of me, there is anger and pushback that I am declaring sovereignty of my own time.