A life organised entirely around a future arrival

The present becomes a corridor rather than a place, and corridors are not where you live.

There is a way of living in which everything current is provisional. The current job is a stepping stone. The current flat is temporary. The current arrangement of the week is being tolerated until the real arrangement becomes possible. This posture is not irrational and it can be genuinely productive for a while, particularly when it is short and specific. It becomes a problem when it becomes permanent, because a person in this posture is spending each present moment as currency to buy a future moment, and when that future moment arrives it too is immediately spent on the next one.

The years pass either way. That is the part that is easy to overlook while you are inside it. The provisional years were not held in escrow pending the arrival of the real ones. They were your thirties, or your forties, and they had weather and meals and conversations in them, all of which happened while you were mentally elsewhere. This is not a moral failing and it does not need to be dramatised. It is simply a way of allocating attention that has a cost, and the cost is invisible until it has already been paid.

The correction is not to abandon plans, which would be its own kind of foolishness. It is closer to insisting that any given stretch of years be liveable on its own terms as well as useful for what comes next. If a plan requires that four years be merely endured, that is worth knowing before you start, and worth checking against whether a slower route might be habitable throughout. Sometimes it will not be, and you proceed anyway. But you proceed having counted properly.