The World Will Keep Moving Without You

This essay is part of The Truths of Aging Nobody Talks About. A MORTL series on what it means to grow old in America.

There are 197 independent countries in the world.^[8] About a quarter of Americans (27 percent) have never traveled abroad, and only 11 percent have been to ten or more countries.^[1] There are more than 7,000 living human languages.^[5] More than 2 million species have been formally described,^[6] and one widely cited estimate says 86% of the species on Earth haven’t been.^[7]

A 2016 analysis of Hubble data found at least 10 times more galaxies in the observable universe than the older estimate of 200 billion, so at least 2 trillion.^[9]

You’re going to die having experienced an almost incomprehensibly small fraction of what exists.

It’s math, and it’s one of the quiet griefs of aging that rarely gets named. The growing awareness that the window is closing, that the list of things you’ll never see or do or know is growing faster than the list of things you will.

The grief of missing out is different from other kinds of grief. It has no specific object. No person who died, no relationship that ended, no single loss you can point to. It’s the grief of finitude itself. The grief of being a particular person, in a particular body, with a particular set of resources and obligations and years remaining, in a world that’s vastly larger and richer and stranger than any one person can ever fully encounter.

This grief tends to intensify with age, for obvious reasons. When you’re 25, the world feels open. The places you haven't been are places you'll go someday. The things you haven't done are things you'll do eventually. The horizon is far enough away that its limits aren’t yet visible. As you get older, the horizon comes closer. "Someday" starts to feel less like a plan and more like a wish. The gap between what you wanted to experience and what you’ll actually experience becomes harder to ignore.

Money is part of this, but not all of it. Many people who have the financial resources to travel extensively don't, because the other constraints, time, health, obligations, the inertia of a settled life, are just as real. And many people who don't have the financial resources have found ways to experience the world that don't require it. The grief of missing out isn’t simply the grief of being poor. It’s the grief of being finite.

The cultural response to the grief of missing out is the bucket list. Write down the things you want to do before you die, and then do them. It’s a reasonable idea that’s been turned into a minor industry of journals and apps and inspirational content, most of which misses the point entirely.

The problem with bucket lists is that they treat the grief of finitude as a logistics problem. If you just plan better, prioritize more aggressively, spend your money more intentionally, you can close the gap between what you wanted to experience and what you will. This is partially true. Many people do have experiences they could have but haven't, for reasons that are more about inertia than genuine constraint. The bucket list, in that sense, is a useful corrective.

But the bucket list can’t solve the fundamental problem. Even if you do everything on your list, the list is finite and the world isn’t. Completing your bucket list doesn’t eliminate the grief of missing out. It just changes the specific things you’re missing out on. The grief isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a condition to be accepted.

Research on aging separates goals about acquiring knowledge from goals about emotional meaning.^[2] Call them expanding and deepening. When time feels open-ended, people tend to prioritize expanding. Meeting new people, going new places, having new experiences. When time feels limited, which is more common with age, people tend to shift toward deepening. Investing more in existing relationships, returning to places they love, going further into experiences they’ve already had rather than adding new ones.

This shift isn’t a consolation prize. When time feels limited, people choose familiar social partners over new ones.^[4] The tenth visit to a place you love is often richer than the first visit to a place you don't yet know. The relationship that has lasted twenty years contains depths that a new relationship can’t. Depth isn’t the same as breadth, but it isn’t inferior to it.

This doesn’t mean you should stop trying to have new experiences. It means that the grief of missing out is, in part, a grief that can be addressed by going deeper rather than wider. The world you’ve already encountered is larger than you’ve fully explored. The people you already know are more interesting than you’ve fully discovered. The places you’ve already been contain more than you saw on the first pass.

The existential psychologist Irvin Yalom writes about what he calls "rippling". The idea that the effects of a single life extend outward in ways that are impossible to fully trace.^[3] The conversation you had with someone that changed how they thought about something. The thing you made that someone else encountered and was moved by. The way you treated people that shaped how they treated others. None of this requires you to have seen all 197 countries. None of it requires a bucket list.

The acceptance that’s hardest to reach, and that the grief of missing out is, in some ways, resisting, is the acceptance that a finite life isn’t a failed life. That seeing a handful of countries instead of ninety-five isn’t a tragedy. That the depth of what you’ve experienced matters as much as the breadth. That the world will keep moving without you, and that this isn’t a problem with the world. It’s just the nature of worlds.

You’re going to die having seen only a fraction of what exists. So is everyone. The question isn’t how to see more of it before you die. It’s whether you’re fully present for the fraction you have.