What the next thing costs you

So far this has been about whether the next thing works. This chapter is about what it costs while you're waiting for it, because the waiting isn't free, and the costs are the kind that don't show up until you add them.

The first cost is the life in hand. While the hum is attached to the next thing, the current job, the current flat and the current town are the waiting room, and nobody improves a waiting room. You don't put shelves up in a flat you're leaving. You don't learn the job you're going to quit. You don't make friends in the town you'll be gone from in two years, and then it's five years and you have no friends there. The next thing takes the effort that the life in hand needed, and it takes it every year until it arrives, if it arrives.

The second cost is decisions made for the wrong reason. If the move is being asked to fix the hum, then the move gets chosen for its hum-fixing features, the garden and the bigger life, rather than for the things that would actually change a Thursday, the commute and the school and whether the friend in the next town is still in the next town. The next thing, chosen as a hope, is often a worse thing than it would have been if it had been chosen as a fix. You buy the outline and live in the rest.

The third cost is time, and it's the one people notice last. There's a version of this habit where life itself is put on hold until the thing arrives. The holiday will be taken when the promotion's come through. The friends will be had when the move's done. Some of the rest of this series is about a particular form of it, and it would take a book of its own. I'll only say here that the years spent in the waiting room are years, and they're the same length as the other kind.

The fourth cost falls on other people. A partner who lives with someone waiting for the next thing lives with someone who is, in a quiet way, always leaving. The children are in a house that's temporary. The colleagues have a colleague who's half out the door. Nobody gets the whole of you, because a part of you has already moved, and they can tell.

None of that is an argument against changing your life. It's an argument against the hope. A fix, chosen and done, costs you the effort of doing it and then it's done. A hope costs you a fraction of every year until you either get it and find the hum waiting, or don't and keep waiting. The book turns to method now, and the first step is a question that takes ten minutes and separates the two.