How to decide if it will matter in five years
If something won’t matter in five years, don’t waste more than five minutes worrying about it now. — The 5x5 Rule
Tomorrow is my birthday.
I don’t typically make a big deal of my birthday. That’s not because of some fear that I am growing older and more wrinkled and less relevant — I’m looking forward to growing up to be a charming-yet-mouthy old woman. (Fair warning.)
I don’t make a big deal about my birthday because once I made a very big deal about my birthday, on the eve of thirty. This day, six years ago.
I was terrified of thirty. Terrified that it was all a downhill slide from here, that my looks would fade, that the promise of my youth would not materialize into adulthood achievement. I was so terrified that I made sure I was married before that thirtieth birthday threshold that would turn me into some old maid.
And on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, in the middle of a brand-new-but-crumbling marriage, in the middle of the nasty affair that eventually ended it, in the middle of an unpurposed graduate program and a bureaucratic nightmare of a career, I ran away to Tulum and dove into the Gulf of Mexico.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Catharsis, maybe. Or maybe a sudden sense of direction — the skies parting and the Spirit flying down like a dove and a voice booming from the heavens with instructions for what to do next.
Didn’t happen, by the way.
There’s a saying that goes something like “If it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter.”
Which is great advice. Except that in the moment, when your life feels tenuous, a messy jumble of your own perseverance and exhausting hard work and striving to get ahead and just hold it all together, how in the hell are you supposed to know what matters in five years? All you know is that you’re trying to get your thesis done by Friday.
Fast-forward six years, and I can laugh at myself. I can even write down my follies and humiliations for the world to laugh along with me.
Of course, I was terrified of thirty — I’d been told my worth and my security was dependent on my youthful attraction to the opposite sex.
Of course, I had a failing career as a low-level bureaucrat — I’d grown up knowing only lack and fear around money and success.
Of course, I’d married the wrong man — I’d never experienced falling in love.
Of course.
Knowing what will matter in five years feels impossible in the moment and so easy in retrospect. But this is the beautiful thing about birthdays. As each one passes, and you get older and you can look back on your old patterns, your old ways of thinking, and decide whether any of them worked, whether any of those things mattered. Sometimes the only way to discern what matters is a process of elimination of the things that didn’t. My marriage, affair, divorce, career, grad school, my cathartic dunk in the Gulf of Mexico — all of it mattered, but only because of how these experiences shaped my thoughts and emotions and the way I walked in the world.
None of it made or broke me.
None of it ‘ruined’ my life.
All of it mattered, and none of it did.
What matters in five years are (1) the things that matter to you in this moment and (2) the stories you tell yourself about them later. And that second part is something you cannot possibly do without getting five years older.
Which is why I don’t make a big deal of them, but I think that birthdays are pretty great.
