Myth of feeling settled
Do you remember, while growing up, hearing conversations about how it is so important to get settled in life? Adults around me would talk about it as though it were a stage where everything felt sorted. To me as a teenager, it sounded like a time in life where one felt completely satisfied and happy. I found the idea aspirational and told myself that it was the secret to happiness.
My first understanding of what it meant to be settled was faring well in my tenth grade. I took it seriously and worked like a horse with blinkers, worried so much that I had exam anxiety and sleeplessness only to realize that when I did well, the goalpost had shifted to a good college and stream of education that would set me up for life. But it didn’t stop there. It moved to completing my education, getting a good job, getting married and having a child. Once those goals were met, the idea of being settled moved to being successful at work, managing finances, buying a car and many more goals which I’m still working towards. Maybe some variation of this is true for all of us as adults across generations. As soon as we achieve our desired goals, we line up another set of goals, believing that this will help us feel happier and more settled.
For millennials, the idea of marriage was associated with being settled. Whether you believed in it or not, it seemed that your parents, and everyone around you thought that
MY FIRST UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT IT MEANT TO BE SETTLED WAS FARING WELL IN MY TENTH GRADE
it was a sure recipe to feeling settled. But it never stopped there. It was followed by an expectation to have not one, but two children to complete the family and then be able to buy a house and so on. For Gen-z, the idea of being successful early on in life and doing work that’s impactful, seems to be associated with feeling settled. Given how much uncertainty they have experienced, upskilling, diversifying and micro influencing are other goals they associate with feeling more certain.
As we continue engaging in this chase, we hope that one day we will arrive at a stage where everything feels settled. Now in my middle adulthood, as a therapist and someone who has a long list of things that are still to be sorted, I have begun to wonder “Do we ever really feel settled in life?” I’m no longer sure. I have come to believe that at various stages of life, we all experience moments where life feels relatively certain, predictable, and even stable, all characteristics associated with ‘feeling settled’. That point in life where everyone you love is healthy, you are earning decently and you have enough love around.
Even in these moments, our anxiety kicks in, where we want this to exist forever and start fearing what if this changes. In that moment, we begin to set new goals and start feeling unsettled. I have caught myself doing this, feeling this anticipatory anxiety kicking in. The joy of adulthood, however, is that the older we get we can catch ourselves and gently remind ourselves to come back to the present and allow ourselves to enjoy these moments when we get a chance. If you can do this, even in some moments, then you clearly are building your own path to happiness. Even at those times when life feels dark and tough, I have begun to see how a kind gesture, a gentle touch, a hug, the presence of loved ones and a message can feel comforting and offer a glimpse of feeling settled in that moment. I wonder why no one told me that I could find my own definition of ‘feeling settled’ and that it can exist in so many forms and shapes, only if I allowed myself to pause and see.
As Meredith, in Grey’s Anatomy says “The dream is this - that we’ll finally be happy when we reach our goals - find the guy, finish our internship, that’s the dream. Then we get there. And if we’re human, we immediately start dreaming of something else.”
Still on so many days, I think of this, catch myself, smile and come back to moments where there is a semblance of equilibrium and I feel happy and content.