Minimalism As the End of Someday

I used to have a candle I wouldn’t burn.

It was a good one. The kind that costs more than you’d spend on yourself on an ordinary Tuesday. The kind you receive as a gift and put somewhere visible because it’s so beautiful. And then you don’t light it because you are saving it: for a quiet evening, or for when the house is finally tidy, or for when you have the time actually to sit and enjoy it properly. It sat on my shelf for two years. Then, at some point, the scent had faded and it just became an object I was storing.

Now I know that it wasn’t really about the candle.

There’s a name for this pattern. A researcher named Vladimir Serkin noticed it in people who moved to remote areas of Siberia to earn money, planning to return to their “real life” somewhere else once they’d saved enough. They lived like temporary residents. They didn’t decorate. They didn’t invest in relationships. They didn’t let themselves belong anywhere. They were waiting for their actual life to begin. Some of them waited for decades.

Serkin called it deferred life syndrome: treating your current life as a draft, a rough version, something to get through before the real thing starts.

The thing is, you don’t have to move to Siberia for this to happen to you. You just need a good enough reason to keep waiting. And modern life is very generous with those.

In my case, I wasn’t waiting for one big thing. It was more like a texture. A background hum of not quite yet. I’d get to the good stuff when the kids were older, when work calmed down, when I’d sorted out the thing I was sorting out, when I finally felt ready in whatever way I kept not feeling ready.

In the meantime, I was living. Just not quite fully. Just in a slightly provisional way, like someone who hasn’t fully unpacked because they’re not sure they’re staying.

The strange thing is I didn’t notice it while it was happening. It didn’t feel like waiting. It felt like being responsible. Like sensibly managing my energy toward a future point where things would be better arranged for actual living.

And then the triplets arrived and blew up every system I had, and I didn’t have the luxury of being provisional anymore. I stopped being able to defer things because there was no bandwidth for deferral. The candle either got lit or it didn’t. The good coffee either got made on a random Wednesday, or it sat there going stale. The phone call to someone I’d been meaning to call either happened in a ten-minute window while someone napped, or it didn’t happen at all.

And I started noticing something strange. The ordinary days were fine in a genuine way. Coffee on a Wednesday morning while the house was briefly quiet. A simple dinner that everyone actually ate. An evening that contained nothing remarkable and felt, somehow, like enough.

What if I’d been waiting to feel something already available? What if ordinary days were never the draft?

I think about what we save things for. The good dishes for guests. The perfume for special occasions. The dress still tagged, kept for someday. The conversation we’re saving until we have more time to do it properly.

There’s something underneath all of it that I find quietly heartbreaking, which is the belief that the present moment isn’t quite worthy yet. That we need to wait until conditions are better before we bring out the real things. Before we show up fully. Before we actually live in the life we’re living.

But conditions don’t get better in the way we’re imagining. They just get different. And someday is a very efficient way to ensure that things never happen.

The researcher Oliver Burkeman, who spent years writing about time and how we use it, arrived at something simple after all of it: the average human life is about four thousand weeks. Most of us feel, somewhere underneath everything, that we have more time than that. That there’s a long stretch ahead where the real living will happen. The number four thousand has a way of making that feeling difficult to maintain.

One of the things minimalism gave me, quietly and without announcing it, was a different relationship with the present.

When you start clearing things out, you inevitably encounter the deferred pile. The things you’re keeping for later. For someday. For the person you’re going to become. And at some point, you have to ask honestly: Is later actually coming? Is someday on the calendar?

And if it’s not, then what are you waiting for? Just as a genuine question.

Because the life you’re waiting to start living is being built right now, out of the ordinary days you’re currently moving through on your way to the good stuff. The Tuesday evenings. The unremarkable dinners. The quiet mornings. The conversations you keep almost having.

This is it. Not the draft. Not the rough version. The actual thing.

I burned the candle eventually. On a completely ordinary evening, for no reason, just because it was there and I wanted to. The house wasn’t tidy. I didn’t have the time to sit and appreciate it properly. I lit it while doing three other things and barely noticed it for the first hour.

It was still better than two more years on the shelf.

P.S. Is there something you’re saving for someday? A dress, a conversation, a version of yourself you’re waiting to become before you let yourself start?