You Can’t Schedule a Meaningful Life
Every day, we’re told we must do things for a reason. Somehow, we’ve internalized the idea that our actions must have meaning, that they must align perfectly with our values, and that anything less is somehow a failure. On the surface that sounds noble, who wouldn’t want to live deliberately, to be thoughtful about choices and goals? But what actually ends up happening is something very different. Instead of guiding us, these messages often add pressure, anxiety, and a sense that we are not enough.
In today’s world, social media is perhaps the most powerful force shaping how we think about ourselves. Scroll through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube and you’re likely to see people who seem to have it all: the perfect body, the perfect job, the perfect morning routine, the perfect relationship. We’re told we’re not working hard enough, not eating the right foods, not beautiful enough, not successful enough. We get bombarded with comparison everywhere we look.
On top of the constant comparison, young people today are almost brainwashed into thinking they must have it all by the age of 20. Social media and online culture push the idea that by the time you’re barely out of your teens, you should already have a thriving business, thousands in savings, a perfect personal brand, and a clear life path. It’s exhausting and unrealistic. Most of us are still figuring out who we are, yet we’re told we’re failing if we don’t hit impossible milestones. This constant messaging creates guilt, and a sense of inadequacy before life has even begun.
No wonder so many of us feel stressed, distracted, or stuck, or even all of those emotions at the same time.
Instead of living our lives, we end up managing them.
We measure every minute. We fill every hour with tasks, goals, reminders, planners and calendars. We plan meticulously, but we rarely stop to ask if what we’re planning matters to our hearts. I’ve caught myself checking my calendar five times in an hour, not because anything changed, but because I felt like I should be doing something. We obsess over things that, in the grand scheme of life, don’t matter at all.
And this constant management makes us forget something crucial: you don’t know when your last day will be.
If you think about it for a moment, it’s almost shocking how much of life we spend preparing for the future, fixing the past, or worrying about what other people think, and how little we actually spend living. A lot has happened to me in the past year, enough to make me realize how quickly things can change, and how little control we actually have. I know this firsthand. We’re so busy surviving that we forget to live.
We react instead of act. We postpone joy until goals are met. We delay connection until schedules align. But life doesn’t pause for planning. Time doesn’t wait for validation. Moments slip away while we chase things that don’t feed our souls.
This tension between living and surviving doesn’t just affect me personally. It affects the people around me, I have even seen it in my team, Averi.
In Averi, we have an incredible group of people. We have creativity, energy, opportunity, connection, and potential. We could enjoy working together, build stories worth remembering, and make experiences that we’ll look back on with warmth. But often, we get distracted. We spend time comparing ourselves to other teams, worrying about what we should be doing, looking backward instead of forward. We get tangled in problems that don’t matter as much as we think they do. We’ve had days where we sat in the same room, all working, but no one really talking. And then other days where we forgot the plan completely, started sharing ideas, laughing, and suddenly the work actually felt alive.
Before we know it, a year goes by and we ask ourselves: What did we actually do that fed the soul of Averi? Did that soul even exist in the first place?
This struggle isn’t just personal or just professional. It’s human.
To understand this more deeply, I find Man’s Search for Meaning incredibly grounding. In it, Viktor Frankl argues that the search for meaning is the central human drive (Frankl, 2006). He observed that even under the most traumatic conditions imaginable, people who could find purpose even in small things were more resilient and more alive. They weren’t defined by comfort or success. They were defined by meaning.
Frankl didn’t suggest that life always makes sense. He suggested that we can choose how we respond to life. In his own words: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances” (Frankl, 2006).
That idea is both simple and powerful. It says that even if we can’t control everything around us, we can control how we orient ourselves. We can choose whether our time is spent in worry or in presence, in comparison or in connection, in survival or in living.
What’s interesting is that research actually backs this up.
Modern research on social media and wellbeing gives us further insight into how comparison, pressure, and authenticity interact in everyday life. A study by Bailey, Matz, and Youyou (2020) found that people who present a real version of themselves online, not a polished or overly curated one, experience greater overall wellbeing. In other words, when people show who they genuinely are instead of trying to look perfect, they feel better about life.
Another study, titled “Perceiving Self as Authentic on Social Media Precedes Fewer Mental Health Symptoms” (2024), found that when people feel authentic about themselves online, they have fewer mental health problems over time (Perceiving the self as authentic on social media precedes fewer mental health symptoms, 2024). This suggests that trying to meet unrealistic standards, whether online or in real life in general, drains us emotionally.
These studies underscore something I’ve felt many times: the more we chase a version of ourselves shaped by others’ expectations, the more we lose touch with what actually inspires us.
But what does living really mean? How is it different from managing?
Living means choosing experiences that matter. It means asking questions like:
What brings me joy?
What makes me feel connected?
What do I want to remember when I’m older?
Who makes me feel alive when I’m with them?
Managing, on the other hand, often looks like:
Planning, but not being present
Staying busy, but not fulfilled
Focusing on the future while overlooking the present
Comparing ourselves instead of connecting with others
There’s nothing inherently wrong with planning or goals. But when planning overtakes living, when tasks replace connection, we lose something essential: the soul of the moment.
For Averi, this might mean focusing less on perfection and more on presence. It might mean celebrating small wins rather than obsessing over outcomes. It might mean sharing meals together, telling real stories, welcoming vulnerability, and creating space for joy even when things aren’t perfect. It might mean making room for laughter, curiosity, and genuine connection, not because they’re “productive” but because they’re alive.
These shifts may sound small, but they are transformative. They take intention. They take courage. And they take a willingness to show up even when life isn’t perfectly organized, perfectly planned, or perfectly presented.
We need to stop pretending that being busy equals being alive. We need to stop drowning in comparison and start paying attention to what actually matters: connection, growth, real experiences, and time spent with people we care about. It is time to make decisions that feed our souls, not just fill our calendars.
We only get one life. We never know when it will end. I don’t want to look back and realize I spent most of it preparing for something that never came, or worrying about things that never mattered.
Maybe it starts with something small: putting the phone down, staying a little longer in a conversation, or choosing not to rush the moment.
Let’s choose that. Let’s finally start living.
References
Bailey, E. R., Matz, S. C., & Youyou, W. (2020). Authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-being. Nature Communications, 11, 4889. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18539-w
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy (Rev. ed.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Perceiving the self as authentic on social media precedes fewer mental health symptoms: A longitudinal approach. (2024). Computers in Human Behavior, 152, 108056. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.108056