"The Plan"

by Te55♥

My husband and I often joke about how everyone we know is following The Plan.  This is nothing more than the course of life that many people choose to follow.  It goes like this:

1. Graduate high school
2. Get some sort of post secondary
3. Meet someone
4. Get married
5. Buy a house
6. Have children
7. Spend your life working, accumulating possessions, go on predicable vacations, rack up debt, work to pay off debt, upgrade the car and house, pressure your now grown children for grandchildren...
8. Grow old and die

You can quibble with #7 if you like, about how meaningful life is because of step #6, but this is the general path of life many people follow.  And it's just not for us. 

Whenever we face something challenging and difficult, such as hauling ourselves to another hemisphere or volunteering in a developing nation, this is often what we come back to.  We are making a conscious choice not to follow The Plan. 

I should be clear that I don't think less of people who chose to follow The Plan, so long as this is what genuinely makes them happy.  Where my problem lies is with people who follow it out of lack of anything better to do, or out of inertia, or because it's what their parents did.  In the same way people look at me in confusion with regards to not wanting children, I look right back at them thinking, "But don't you want anything more out of life?!"

My goals for this life are actually pretty simple.  I want to see the world.  All of it.  And I want to leave the planet a little bit better for my having been here.  I'm consuming a lot of resources by my very existence, and I want to be worthy of them.  I don't need my name published in history books, just to know that in the balance, I did more good than harm.  For me, that doesn't mean following The Plan.