For those who have always wanted more than one life

If you’ve ever felt that your life, job, community, maybe even hobbies you spend your time and energy on don’t really fit or represent who you actually are, then I get it. I’ve been there. I’d live one life externally, showing people one side of who I was, while internally, my life was very different. I couldn’t get it. Why don't the two properly align? I asked myself this all the time.

I felt like I was performing a version of myself each time I met someone. And quite frankly, I also felt misunderstood. I wasn't pretending to be someone I wasn't, but I was limiting how much of myself I let out.

I had so many projects and interests I wanted to follow, and yet I’d only show a small version of myself to different people. I assumed they weren't interested in knowing more. That's fair, and probably true, but it's not really the point. The point is that not being able to fully express myself (my passions, my excitement, my weird little interests, all the random things my brain was obsessed with that week) was doing strange things to me. I stopped wanting to hang out with people, because it felt like playing a role every time. I started to dislike who I was around people and loved who I was alone, where my imagination could run off into projects and activities that seemed completely unrelated to each other.

Eventually, I realised that I might be what people now call multi-passionate.

There is a more established term in the academic literature: multipotentiality, used to describe people with diverse abilities and interests, particularly around education and career choice. And as Walt Whitman wrote in the poem " Song of Myself" in 1855:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I gladly own the label. And honestly, I think nearly everyone is multi-passionate to some extent. The difference is in how much.

Not everyone has a strong need to build a life around their passions and personality, change their degree or job because they got interested in something new, or turn almost every hobby into a fully fledged project. Some people are happy with a job that pays the bills and has nothing to do with their core being. Some people are happy without a deep understanding of their needs, because their interests don't contradict each other and they're not constantly asking what on earth is going on with them. Some people can have a few hobbies without attaching them to their identity. I envy this a bit. I can't stop thinking how much (emotionally) easier my life would be if I didn't have to overthink any of it. But it isn't.

I’ve always wanted more than one life

I've always wanted my job to give me deeper meaning. We spend most of our lives working, so why waste it? The problem was that one day I wanted to be one thing, and the next day something entirely different. That's why I always had random side projects outside work hours. For the longest time, I thought the solution was simply a job that looked more like what I did in my spare time.

Not that easy! I wouldn't necessarily enjoy doing full-time what I enjoy for a few hours a week. And my idea of a good career would change with my mood. One day I wanted to lead a company. Another day I wanted to be an individual contributor owning a function only I understood. Another day I wanted to live in the countryside, in peace and quiet, researching, writing and reading, not working or performing at all. These don't connect well. They're different lives. I wanted them all, preferably at the same time.

And it wasn't only about career; it was about everything. One week I wanted a big city: loads of things to do, loads of people, easy access to everything. The next week I hated the idea and wanted a village, maybe a horse, vegetables I'd grown myself. Then I'd want to travel the world, immerse myself in different cultures and be surprised every day by new views, customs, words and food. Then, another week, a cosy house surrounded by mountains, awesome neighbours, and a local community with weekly meetups and real, deep connections.

This made perfect sense to me. We have one life, so why not experience everything that sounds interesting? But others were quick to point out the inconsistencies in my life vision. I stopped sharing and started questioning myself. Is this not how everyone is? Can some people just choose one vision and stick to it? Are some people content with one life, without overthinking it? Because I grieved all the lives I thought I couldn't have if I chose just one.

It turns out there's a whole book about that feeling. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote about the tension between the life we live and the life we imagine we might have had in his book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. To simplify, I understand that his point basically was that grieving our unlived lives is not a failure but us learning about what we actually want.

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what career or life I choose. I still won't feel fully content in any single one, and I'll go looking for something else. And that's totally okay. I'm happy I finally realised I don't need a perfect career that fits all of me inside it. But I do need a life with room to express my multitudes, in different ways, at different times.

How I finally accepted my need for variety

I did all kinds of personality tests under the sun, with varying success. The one that made a real difference was the Big Five.

I scored exceptionally high on adventurousness within the openness to experience, which is one of the six facets used to measure openness in the IPIP-NEO framework. The facet is essentially about our appetite for unfamiliar experiences, variety, and trying new things. It was quite obvious to me given my history, dreams, and thoughts, but seeing it written down in a test result somehow made me accept it more easily.

I also want to make a distinction about something here. Being open to experience doesn’t automatically make you scattered. You’re most likely not equally focused on all of your interests anyway. One study finding suggests that people high in openness to experience tend to be both generalists and specialists: they engage in a wider variety of creative activities, but only a subset of those activities occupies most of their efforts. This is definitely true for me.

So a high openness score doesn't automatically mean you can't focus. It may just mean you're passionate about trying and experiencing a wider variety of things than most. The label matters less than recognising yourself for what you are, so you can work with it in a way that actually works for you.

I decided to stop trying to choose one thing

Eventually I started looking for ways to stop "hiding" and integrate all of myself into my life. To stop limiting myself. To stop trying to pick one damn thing. Instead of asking "which one life do I actually want?", I started asking: "How can I build a life with room for all the different parts of what I want?"

Very recently I found out that a Victorian philosopher, John Stuart Mill, argued the same thing. He wrote that there should be different "experiments of living", and that people should be free to try out different ways of life to discover what suits them. He meant it for society at large, but I think it works beautifully for one person, too. Real liberty might be less about oppression and imposed constraints and more about gaining freedom to do and be everything we desire to be.

Have you heard of person-environment fit? The idea is that when there is greater compatibility between the two, people tend to experience better outcomes in a number of areas. Although the evidence for exactly how much fit explains better outcomes is mixed, I personally think that compatibility matters a lot in what we can be and what we can achieve.

So, long story short, I didn't need to magically become less complicated. I needed to stop living as though I were someone else and instead find the best way to integrate all of myself into the one life I have.

So I built myself a process

I like building things to solve my own problem. I’m not going to just read something, nod, and leave it be. To solve this very personal problem, I designed myself a goal planner, then a life design planner, then I created a structured life design method that I followed to gain more clarity about myself, what I want, and how I can get it. The further I went, the more I realised that I don’t want my life to focus on goals, progress, and achievements anymore, but on space, pace, and a way of living that gives me enough room to be and do everything I’m interested in doing, to feel alive, and to be fully and unapologetically myself.

The process has been liberating and required me to reinvent myself multiple times. I felt lost and broken several times; I felt behind and not good enough. But ultimately, I realised that all of this is just a part of the journey to reach the “destination” that doesn’t exist yet. Which, apparently, is a life much simpler and less ambitious than I’ve ever thought it was in my 20s. It doesn’t mean things are easier. In many ways, they are actually harder, as sometimes leading a simple but meaningful life can be harder than leading a life that meets our society’s expectations of success and value.

The structured process I followed allowed me not only to start discovering what I am as a person, in private, but also my hidden limiting beliefs, fears, and my own shadow. The dreams and goals that weren’t actually mine, that existed only so that I could prove something to someone else. Things I did not for myself, but to impress, to feel that I’m a valued member of society, or to prove my worth.

It doesn’t mean that the process is complete either. As I read, live, speak with people, and learn more, I realise that there are more things to try, to understand, to test, so I keep adding, I keep simplifying, I keep improving and extending. Nevertheless, I decided that I want to share it with others, even if this is not ready and still imperfect.

I will share the structured life design method I use myself in my future personal essays/reflections, but I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean people can discover themselves once and learn how they should live. This is not about the transformation at all. In fact, for many, I assume, life probably won’t even change that much for a long time. We keep changing as people, and our desires and expectations change, too, so we never just discover the best way of being and living; we need to experiment. To test things out. To dispose of and to hold. But I do believe that spending many hours on self-discovery, reflection, thinking, experimenting, and challenging the stories we tell ourselves ultimately leads to a different version of ourselves. Not necessarily a new version - but the real one. The one we hide, refuse to accept, the one we limit, or simply don’t recognise. And once we meet that self, we can no longer live our lives to impress others; we must choose lives that let us feel whole. Even if it means we lose many people and roles we hold dear along the way. I guess this is a part of the journey, so follow the process at your own risk if you decide you’re interested in following along.

In more ways than one, I think the whole process is rather similar to Montaigne’s essais - he wrote about everything from friendship to sleep, trying to understand himself, one attempt (essai) at a time. Each module of the life design method can be viewed as that, too.

Before you start: is now the right time?

Around 2,000 years ago, Seneca warned his friend Lucilius that the person who is everywhere is nowhere. Before you spread out into all your possible lives, you need somewhere steady to stand. The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of inner steadiness: ataraxia. It basically means freedom from disturbance.

Just think about it: when our sleep, health, money, or relationships are under strain, our stress response makes it much harder to think clearly and make good decisions. You can still do the work, but you'll get far more out of it from steadier ground.

So if you want to go through the method, it might be worth getting your foundations right first. I’ll share an essay on this very topic sometime next week, so you can read and decide whether you’re ready before I start sharing the real stuff —the actual modules of the life design method.

That’s all for now.

Thanks for reading!

Lina

Photo by Marcin Sajur (Unsplash)

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