Starting planning your life again, but this time with compassion

eing able to plan your life makes you feel that you have control over it. There’s comfort in plotting out what you want your existence to look like in a year, or five.

But in March 2020, when the pandemic sent people into their homes and subsumed so much of what seemed certain about the world, it was clear that this control was an illusion. No matter how much we planned, life could be forceful and unexpected and upend everything. And so now, even as we’re optimistic about reemerging and pointing ourselves toward long-term goals again, plotting the future can feel daunting or almost impossible. Many people’s crystal balls are foggy and filled with anxiety. We’re not sure, after over a year of possibly anticipating no further than when we might finish that 1,000-piece puzzle, what to do with the life we’re still lucky to have.

Melanie Deziel, 30, had her first child in September 2019 and planned to have a second shortly afterward, since both she and her husband love having siblings. But instead, when in-person gatherings were canceled, Deziel saw her earnings as a speaker at marketing conferences evaporate, and she and her family made a spur-of-the-moment move from Jersey City, New Jersey, since they no longer needed to be near New York City for meetings and wanted a bigger, cheaper space.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, they rented an apartment after a video tour. Now, Deziel has a new job as the content director at a marketing firm, her family is settled in a new home and her daughter is 19 months old, but Deziel is no longer sure about having a second child.

“It’s really hard to plan ahead,” Deziel said. “Even now it’s wild to think about what the next two months will look like. There’s so many unknowns. It’s almost too scary to make a decision like that.”

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Call it “future block,” or being unable to envision what your goals are after a period when you could put off major decisions, or were forced to. Even before the pandemic, cultural shifts and economic turmoil delayed traditional adult milestones like completing college, getting married and having children. The pandemic only intensified these delays. Many people were suddenly unable to pay their rent and had to return to their parents’ homes, while others were furloughed indefinitely from a job, or decided to postpone marriage or not have a child.

‘Planning was working against them’

When the pandemic started, Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist and the author of Your Next Big Thing: Ten Small Steps to Get Moving and Get Happy, advised his clients to stop planning. To survive the tremendous changes happening, he told them not to think about any future beyond the next week or so.

“Planning was working against them,” he said.

As the pandemic continued, the usual markers that define lives and help close one chapter and enter another — birthdays, graduations, weddings — took place over video chats, if at all. And that experience isn’t the same.

“We’re caught in this cycle of thinking Zoom can replicate physical spaces, and it can’t,” said Jason Farman, a media scholar at the University of Maryland and the author of Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting From the Ancient to the Instant World. “It can’t replace us toasting with a glass and hearing that sound.”

Each day feeling the same causes a “weird speeding up and slowing down of time,” he said, which is why it feels like March 2020 happened both eons ago and last week. “It’s very disorienting.”

Now we are on the brink of a hazy future, but a future nonetheless. Many people are heading out of the pandemic with clarified or altered expectations for their lives, partly because the coronavirus exposed their mortality.

“It shined a light on that death wasn’t necessarily going to happen when you’re 88 years old,” said Hal Hershfield, an associate professor of marketing and behavioural decision making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management who studies long-term decision making. “It could happen sooner.”

But even if we have newfound priorities about what’s important and what’s not, it’s hard to plan. Being shut in with his girlfriend a few months after they had begun living together made Marcus Garrett, 38, an auditor in Houston, certain he wanted to marry her.

“If you can survive a pandemic, you can survive anything,” he said. He proposed in March, but the couple are not thinking about having a wedding until the fall of 2022.

“It’s hard to imagine tranquility,” Garrett said. “It feels like something ominous that will derail it, so what is the point of planning?”

‘Give yourself a little bit of grace’

So what do you do if you feel this kind of “future block”?

First, tell yourself it’s OK to go after something big and exciting you want to do for yourself, even while you’re still recovering from the fear and loss of the pandemic. In other words, this may not seem like a good time to get married or have a baby, but it might not be a bad time either.

“Now, or some version of now, might be as good a time as any,” Hershfield said. “This is part of the modified world that we’re in. There can be some sadness alongside the positive.”

Next, get out of your head. Thinking about the future isn’t going to lessen your anxiety about it. Instead, Michaelis advised, take micro-steps to a major goal. For example, if you’re mulling moving, go to an open house. Or if you think you want to begin a romantic relationship, spend 10 minutes on a dating app.

“Try something and see how it feels and how it works,” he said. “The way the mind works, these things that seemed insurmountable are now suddenly very doable.”

As you aim big, try to turn down the voice that might be telling you that time is ticking. Change might not happen as quickly as you think it should; let it take the time it takes, and in that space you may be better able to hone your goals.

“I think we assume that we should have all of the answers, even in the midst of an uncertain, really challenging event like a pandemic,” Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, said. “The right response if you’re struggling with a decision is to give yourself a little bit of grace.”

Nick Casalini, 37, an aspiring comedian in Los Angeles, was relieved when the pandemic shut down the open mics and stand-up shows, and the intense competition he felt with everyone else trying to make it in Hollywood.

“The pressure was gone,” he said. Now, he isn’t sure what parts of that life he wants to pursue, but is telling himself that this uncertainty is OK.

“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’ve started doing more self-compassion,” Casalini said, “just these meditations where you treat yourself like someone you love. I wouldn’t say to a friend: ‘That guy needs to get his act together. What a loser.’ I’d say: ‘That guy’s my friend. I love that guy.’”

Reset your mindset

If you’ve delayed certain goals because of the pandemic or now think you want to do something else and are panicked you’re behind, it’s all right. Even if you imagined a very specific future, it can be rethought — there’s not only one way life can proceed.

“It’s an example of good planning to recognise that there can be multiple courses your life can take,” Hershfield said.

Michaelis uses the example of running for a train and narrowly missing it. Instead of being frustrated he isn’t on the departing train, he tells himself that there was a reason he didn’t make that train, that he was meant to be on another one.

No matter what, you aren’t the only person who had a different vision for the past 14 months. Robert Self, a historian and professor of modern American history at Brown University, points out that when something affects our entire society, delays aren’t individual anymore. The world isn’t continuing without you.

“This is affecting so many people, and so many people are sharing in this experience,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s going to be wholly positive, but you’re not going to be going through this alone.”

© The New York Times