When To Say Fuck It

There’s a moment that arrives quietly, somewhere between your early twenties and the first time you feel tired for no reason at all, where life starts asking you questions it won’t accept jokes as answers to anymore.

It asks them in other people’s voices.

My father’s, mostly.“When are you going to start sticking in?”

It’s not cruel. It’s practical. It’s spoken in the dialect of bills, pensions, and knowing exactly where you’ll be on a Tuesday in six months’ time. It’s the language of men who worked so their children wouldn’t have to panic the way they once did. And still, it lands like a stone in the stomach.

Because I don’t not want to stick in.I just don’t want to disappear while doing it.

I’ve always carried this inert knowledge. Quiet, constant, undeniable; That I want to see the world and meet everyone in it. Not in the Instagram, pin-a-map-with-red-dots way, but in the messy, human way. I want to talk to strangers on overnight buses. I want to sit on unfamiliar floors and learn how other people make tea. I want to know what the stars looks like when it’s in someone else’s sky.

At the same time, I want to do well. I want a profession that fits me like a coat you don’t have to think about. I want a good, ordinary life, one with soft mornings, decent wine, shelves that hold books, vinyl and memories. I want the finer, quieter things. Stability. Pride. The ability to say, I built this, without irony.

These two desires live in me like opposing tides.

In one mind, I’m sensible. I make plans. I think in five-year blocks. I imagine a future that resembles success as it’s been explained to me: nice car, big house, family photos that get updated every Christmas. A life that looks correct from the outside. A life that works.

In the other, I’m restless. I need motion. I need to be caught inbetween moments and phenomena. Things that can’t be scheduled or monetised. I want to dedicate myself to the passage of time well spent. To people to talk to, absorb, imagine, believe. I want to be part of the present, fully submerged in the beauty of whatever life is offering that day, even if it’s uncomfortable or uncertain or smells faintly of damp hostels and regret.

The problem is not choosing one over the other.The problem is time.

As I get older, my understanding of time becomes more deluded, more mysterious. It no longer stretches infinitely ahead of me like it did when I was nineteen and broke and fearless. Now it feels conditional. Finite. Measured in pay cycles and expectations and the subtle panic of falling behind.

I can’t comprehend whether I can fit it all in.

Is there room to wander and build?To disappear for a while without vanishing forever?To go and still come back intact?

We talk about “gap years” like they’re a doorway that slams shut at a certain age. Like curiosity has an expiry date. Like wanting more from life than routine is something you eventually grow out of, the way you grow out of bad haircuts or believing you’re invincible.

But what does a successful life actually look like?

If you asked me plainly, I’d probably say the same things everyone does. Comfort. Security. Love. People who show up. A deathbed surrounded by those closest to me, eyes closing gently, knowing I did it right. Knowing I took my one chance at this strange, fleeting thing and didn’t waste it. Knowing I went smelling…Full, satisfied, complete.

And still, there’s this unwavering thought that won’t leave me alone: what if doing it right means leaving first?

What if it means hoboing across countrysides instead of dreaming about them? What if it means choosing experience over explanation, stories over status, dirt under my fingernails instead of hypothetical regrets? What if the life I’m supposed to live can’t be neatly described on a CV?

I don’t have an answer. That might be the most honest thing I can offer.

All I know is that somewhere between sticking in and slipping away, there must be an equilibrium. A way to honour ambition without suffocating wonder. A way to work without forgetting why life felt electric before it became efficient.

Maybe growing up isn’t about choosing one path and burning the map to the other.Maybe it’s about learning how to walk both, unevenly, imperfectly. While time keeps moving, indifferent and beautiful, daring you to keep up.

And maybe, just maybe, the point is not to arrive correctly, but to arrive having lived.

Written by James Pearson