One aspect of modern life in the modern world that puzzles and intrigues me is this burden of intentions that we all carry around for us.

Let me explain. While chatting with my sister earlier this month, she mentioned some small thing she had been meaning to do for a long time, and it suddenly hit me that this is not a rare thing. It is, in fact, a nearly universal aspect of modern life. People walk around with enormous lists of things they plan to do some day, when they get around to it, when they have the time, and then feel guilty for not doing them.

Thus, this phenomenon insures that all us modern naked beach apes carry a burden of guilt for intentions unfulfilled, regardless of how realistic said intentions were or even whether they are something you really, truly want.

A severe but not entirely invalid line of argument could be made that if you wanted to do these things bad enough, you would have done them by now, and the fact that you haven’t means that you likely never will and you would be a lot better off just forgetting about the whole thing and ridding yourself of a lot of unproductive and thus entirely unnecessary guilt.

And yet, we never do that. We hold on to these intentions and their resulting burden of sadness and guilt, and so one has to wonder why.

What is it we are getting out of this internal list? It must be something precious for us to be willing to endure the costs.

I think what we get is hope. Despite the fact that when we think of these little tasks, we risk feeling bad for not having done them yet, we really enjoy the idea that we will do all these things “some day”. It is the miracle of the undefined future, where terms like “some day”, “eventually”, and “when I feel like it” can be used to bypass many layers of reason and prudence and allow us to believe that we will do damned near anything…. some day.

For small things, this is harmless. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things if you never get back to knitting Afghan blankets if you otherwise have a happy and fulfilling life. If thinking that makes you happy, then it is probably a net good to believe it, whether it’s realistic or not.

But some kinds of hope are toxic, and if the feeling that you will do certain things “some day” keeps you from doing them in the present and that in turn keeps you in an unhappy or unfulfilling life, you might just be better off deciding, right now, whether you are going to do it, or give up and move on.

One thing I have noticed about the things people have on their little lists is that they nearly always involve either virtue or self-actualization. They are the things that people think they ought to do, and possibly even the sort of thing that people thing people like themselves DO do, but which involve a certain amount of sacrifice of our precious, precious off time and so we never actually do them.

So whether it’s volunteering down at the homeless shelter (virtue) or finally taking that last French course you need to get your minor (self-actualization), this burdensome list is usually filled with the sort of things we feel we ought to do, and it is just easier to imagine we will do them some day than it is to actually do them, and so they get added to the list.

And adding things to that list is so easy, isn’t it? It’s easy and it feels good and you never even think about how long the list is already or, heaven forbid, how realistic it is that you will do whatever it is your adding.

As for prioritizing the list so you can tackle the most important ones first?

Forget about it.

So the list gets longer and longer and longer, and as it does, a very specific kind of sadness begins to accumulate. Because no matter what sort of deal you have made somewhere in your mind about hope and fun, not doing the happen golden life-affirming things you keep meaning to do is damned depressing.

Some part of you is like the kid whose Dad always promises to go play catch with them “next time, Champ. Next time for sure!”.

Sooner or later, that part of you realizes it’s never going to happen, and the constant disappointment of the dream turns it sour, and now the item on your list is not a source of joy, but only of guilt and self-recrimination.

And yet, you can’t delete it off the list either, because that would mean admitting that you were never going to do it.

And that would mean killing the dream.

As I always say in these things, I am by no means exempting myself from this phenomena. I have a lot of dreamy ideas about things I could do “some day”, and these dreams, unrealistic as they may seem to someone else, have been a great comfort to me through a lot of years of emotional isolation.

I don’t think I could ever give them up. Not unless one of them came true. But I could never, I think, settle down to live an utterly mundane life of selling car insurance and going to BBQs and talking about RRSPs.

I have the seeds of greatness within me. I have known it since I was a child. There is a part of me that is a mighty wizard and that makes me the sort of person who can really leave a mark on the world.

And some day, god damn it, that is what I am going to do. I am going to use this magnificent mangled mind of mine to shiny a mighty big light into the world, and where the light falls, miracles and wonders shall occur.

And that’s a dream well worth the burden.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks.