101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

than you think 
YOU DESERVE
If all great things are done by a series of small things put together,
then great lives are created by a series of small moments put
together, most of which we miss out on because we’re writing the
synopsis rather than the paragraphs of the chapters.
It’s as though we live to write our eulogies. We get degrees and
spouses and desire storylines and unfolding fates that make sense
and flow well and ultimately write beautiful and admirable stories, but
only ones that we will ever tell ourselves. We’re never actually
remembered for more than who we were and who we loved and how
we lived in a moment-to-moment sense. The rest—the big,
overarching, milestone kind of things don’t matter, and maybe they
never did.
We miss the moments because we’re distracted. Distracted by the
one person we search for in a crowd, fearing they’re there, even
when they’re hours and states and other impossibilities away. By the
someone who is always on our minds when we’re writing or creating
or choosing or riding the train or falling asleep—and we behave as
though they are with us, and narrate our lives by what they’d say and
feel and think if they were with us, though we know we’d never know
that.
There’s always one daunting task, always one to-do list that fails to
include anything surrounding what we actually want to do. Not for
work, not for the credit, not out of responsibility, but just because we
want to be happy. Always one more promotion, one more move, one
more great love to find before we can be happy.
But we aren’t. We don’t choose. We don’t think we deserve it. We
keep searching, and we keep narrating, and we keep living as
though we have a tomorrow to live out all these grand fantasies and

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promises to ourselves, when the reality is that unless we stop today
we’ll live forever on the promise of tomorrow. These are daydreams.
They’re visions and hopes and issues that don’t exist. The minute
you start thinking of the past or future, realize that it’s only a thought
of a thing, a thought that’s happening in a now. A now that we’re
missing.
Tomorrow never changes us. Our jobs never change us. Our
relationships don’t, either. Our problems change as the things in our
lives do. The issues we take are reflections of what’s wrong with us,
the people we hate reflections of our insecurities. No matter how
many things come and go, we take the same issues and hate the
same people for the same reasons, and never stop to realize that it’s
not them that we hate; it’s the parts of us they force us to recognize.
You have to stop living for how other people will remember you.
Stop living by telling yourself the story that you think other people will
be happy reading. Because it’s an empty and lifeless one, and it robs
you of the thing you’re most seeking when you do it. The most
important thing is that you do what makes you happy—and that you
understand that your happiness is your choice and your
responsibility alone. It is not a day or a job or a relationship or a
change away, it’s right now. The only work to do is to remove the
blocks that prevent you from living it out. The only change that has to
happen is to you.
The untold millions of little moments are what matter. It’s not about
having a job; it’s about having a life that you want to live. It’s not
about having a degree; it’s about the nights you finally felt the
opposite of loneliness. It’s not about having a relationship; it’s about
being in one. And it’s not about living a life that other people can sum
up comfortably; it’s about having a life wherein those millions of
moments build and corroborate with one another—and you follow
them—and have more. You won’t be there to hear the stories and
eulogies they tell of you—you’re only here to know them now.

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HOW TO THINK