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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about “the deferred life program” that people often find themselves living.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Amazing things are happening around us every day, but all we can think of is the thing we need to be doing instead of being present.
- Are you deferring the moments in your child’s life assuming you will have another chance in the future?
- Everything is temporary. If you spend your life deferring everything, what will you regret when your life is ending?
- Some of us have deeply embedded programming that encourages us to defer life
- Society sees nobility in the deferred life program. There’s nothing noble about designing life the way you want it.
- People who create the lives they want are seen as lucky or selfish.
- We have more control over our day to day lives than we think.
- “Real life will begin sometime in the future. I need to suck it up now, but things will be much better in the future.”
- People will tell you to stay present with your children because they grow up so fast. That is considered a noble occupation.
- There is less messaging in society that you should quit a job that makes you feel miserable.
- People see nobility in the struggle of working a job that supports the family even if you are miserable.
- “Life begins at retirement.”
- Deferred life propaganda can rob you of your life and add needless stress
- It’s not whether you are allowing indulgences in your life, it is whether you are in your life right now.
- Are you living the life you want to be living?
- “Life is not a dress rehearsal.”
- This life is real. Stay present instead of waiting for life to begin.
- Some paradigms teach that this life isn’t the real life. That believers need to spend their time today preparing for a future paradise.
- It is a skill to take your circumstances and make the best of them, which is something we can learn from these paradigms.
- But some paradigms teach that nothing is good, so there’s no point in changing things for the better.
- We settle into unhappy situations because we don’t think we have the permission to change.
- We believe that making meaningful choices to suit ourselves is somehow bad, so we become more and more under-resourced until we can’t function.
- “I’m supposed to be living this.”
- “If I’m going to be a good person, this is what people do.”
- We can architect our life, but changing direction and architecting something different is difficult and time-consuming.
- “I don’t like my life! Who is responsible for me not liking my life today?” You are responsible
- Wanting something different means architecting something different which requires permitting yourself to want something different
- Stop kicking the can down the road
- The deferred life program involves a lot of waiting. Waiting for someone or something to come along and rescue you.
- We are actually waiting on ourselves.
- There’s no board of directors for our life that is planning the next phase for us.
- Maybe it is selfish to allow yourself to become so unhappy that you can’t be present with your children
- Suck the marrow out of life!
- We aren’t talking about delayed gratification: work hard now and get a better return in the future
- Deferred life is a different mentality: it is a lack of permission to live the life you want
- The first step is the awareness that you tend to think this way
- We wait for the movie moment that kicks off the life we want: wedding day, 21st birthday, the birth of our first child, etc.
- We keep waiting for the epic scene where we are the hero of our own story.
- “If it is to be it is up to me.”
- It is hard to design the lifestyle you want.
- Sometimes when we honestly look at our lives, we see that we live an enviable life, but we are still kicking the can down the road
- We get addicted to the future paced viewpoint
- Some types may struggle with the tendency to defer to the future more than others.
- What are the things you are deferring in your life?
- Slow everything down and take the time to get present in your life
- What would happen if you didn’t fulfill your promises? What is it you want to do? What is the ROI?
- There is a lot of work to make sure you are truly in your life.
- If you don’t want to live a deferred life you are going to have to go down to the wiring of your life and ask yourself the questions you don’t want to ask
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35 comments
Hey Joel and Antonia!
Thanks for the great content as usual. I just wanted to share a personal experience/viewpoint concerning this podcast.
This is probably going to seem like a bit of a misinterpretation of exactly the nuanced point that is being discussed here, but I think I can tie it back to relevancy. My wife and I have been
working sort of a “strategic” deferred life plan for the last 8 years or so. We both have valued higher education for all of our adult lives, but both came from families with no college degree
experiences. We have been trying to enrich our future quality of life by investing in ourselves.
The part where this ties into the topic is the sacrifices and the mentality that it takes to stick to the commitments of a long-term plan. I can’t begin to expound on the sacrifices we have had to
make along the way. From quality time missed with each other, other family members, and money sacrifices (we have taken turns educating and have paid for almost all of it out of pocket), it has been a long, difficult road. On top of the focus on education, we had our first child
halfway through my four years of school. He is truly a blessing and has brought so much joy
to our lives, but as any parent knows time and energy become drained with young children. Right now we are looking at the last 5 months of my education and looking forward with very much excitement to moving to a place where we truly love to live, can raise our son in a happy place, and finally have the quality of life we have been working towards all these years.
All that being said, I have been spending a lot of time thinking lately about tempering the fantasy with some reality of the near future. I know that life is messy and that getting through this season is not going to solve all of our problems and ensure that we will live happily ever after. It has been so long since we have truly been able to live in the moment in the way that many people do, and I think there has been a lot of happiness sacrificed as a result. I’m trying to stay grounded in reality while also trying to keep my excitement up for our new life!
That’s basically it for my experience contribution, but I wanted to take a moment and truly thank you, Antonia for sharing the things you’ve been facing with family. I can relate somewhat to what you were saying about having your daughter know her grandparents. From my perspective, as I have grown up and begun my own family, there are things we have to reevaluate as we move through life. Yours is more extreme than mine for sure, but I think we all have to create our best version of what our children are exposed to as they grow up. What I am talking about is how we as our parent’s children decide to keep or throw out experiences and beliefs that we were raised with. When we get a life partner and have a child with them we start our own new family dynamic that cannot be exactly like the one we were raised in. This causes friction with our parents (most unfortunately), that has to be confronted or at the very least felt by everyone involved. Without being able to see the future and how our kids turn out as adults, I think the best thing we can do is be authentic within our immediate family nucleus. Hopefully our parents
are understanding in this, as they surely experienced it to some extent when they were establishing our families. If not, there must be a difficult conversation about boundaries and preserving the new family values that we are trying to establish. This can very tough on a relationship with your parents, and is a very hard issue to face. At least to some extent, I feel your pain.
Good luck to you in navigating these deep questions, I am a huge fan of your content, podcast, and how you live your lives. Thanks so much for the discussion!
This is an interesting podcast. It solidifies in a way what I have been discovering about myself lately. Before hearing this podcast, I thought of it in the the context of the mentality that I developed as a kid of “when I grow up, I’m going to…” which doesn’t seem to have left me even though am an adult now. Because this stuff hasn’t happened yet, it still feels like I haven’t grown up yet. Time to make it happen.
Thank you, Antonia, for the examples at the end! Those were so helpful and a great addition to an already awesome podcast. You said “I don’t know how interesting my life is” and to respond to that, I think it is helpful (and interesting!) to hear the down to earth, day-to-day things. Because most of us won’t be applying these concepts to huge, Hollywood situations. We’ll be applying it to hard familial relationships and living situations and raising kids and so it’s helpful to have such relatable content.
Hey guys. Great podcast as usual. INTJ here. What I’ve figured out thanks to the death of my Dad in June is that I’m ready to be limitless. How I go about that is being intentional about my decisions in the here and now. Fake it til you make it was the way I started this process, and by that I started thinking of all the options that I want to take advantage of with the resources I have. For instance, I inherited a large sum of money (to me). I had more fun and had more satisfaction figuring out what to do with this money without spending it! After I pondered the many different things I could do with money I figured out the best way to use this resource was to be future minded. I paid off some old debts which will enable me to move forward, energetically and emotionally. This was freeing and felt like I was preparing myself for the future I am creating. And creating my future is something I do with the intention of my decisions on a very regular basis. I’ve come to be unattached to all the results of these decisions. I go by how I feel when I make the decisions if that makes sense. Most of the results of my very intentional decisions have been more than I ever imagined.
Hey Joel, Antonia or whoever is reading this,
MBTI and other online tests have called me INTJ. Few are better at procrastination and delayed gratification than myself. I was on Twitter and Facebook (yes, even Intuitive Awakening), but I left the social media platforms (I never bothered with Instagram or Snapchat or miscelleneous) because I felt that I wasn’t ready to get out there and connect with the world as I haven’t figured out my life yet. I felt that people will not take me seriously unless I’ve done something noteworthy and become a thought leader.
Funny enough, I haven’t made much progress since then.