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 actually means to grow old in America.

There are 195 countries in the world. The average American passport holder visits nine of them in a lifetime.^[1] There are approximately 10,000 distinct human languages. There are 2.5 million species of living organisms that have been formally described, and estimates suggest that 80% of all species have not yet been discovered. There are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

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

This is not a morbid observation. It is a mathematical one. And it is one of the quiet griefs of aging that almost nobody talks about. The growing awareness that the window is closing, that the list of things you will 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 is 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 is 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 are 25, the world feels open. The places you haven't been are places you will go someday. The things you haven't done are things you will do eventually. The horizon is far enough away that its limits are not 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 will 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 is not simply the grief of being poor. It is 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 is a reasonable idea that has 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 cannot solve the fundamental problem. Even if you do everything on your list, the list is finite and the world is not. Completing your bucket list does not eliminate the grief of missing out. It just changes the specific things you are missing out on. The grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be accepted.

There is a distinction, in the research on aging and wellbeing, between what psychologists call "expanding" and "deepening."^[2] Younger people tend to prioritize expanding. Meeting new people, going new places, having new experiences. Older people tend to shift toward deepening. Investing more in existing relationships, returning to places they love, going further into experiences they have already had rather than adding new ones.

This shift is not a consolation prize. Research consistently shows that deepening produces higher levels of wellbeing than expanding, for most people, most of the time.^[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 cannot. Depth is not the same as breadth, but it is not inferior to it.

This does not 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 have already encountered is larger than you have fully explored. The people you already know are more interesting than you have fully discovered. The places you have 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 195 countries. None of it requires a bucket list.

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

You are going to die having seen only a fraction of what exists. So is everyone. The question is not how to see more of it before you go. The question is whether you are fully present for the fraction you have.