[From Unsplash]
Underrated life advice:
Schedule your fun first. The vacation. The dinner. The concert. The weekend trip. Put joy on the calendar before work fills it. Most people work first, play with what's left. There's never anything left. Book fun like meetings. Treat joy like obligation.
Happiness needs planning too.
- Scott D. Clary
This post showed up in my feed one morning and lingered longer than most things in a feed ever do. My first reaction was simple: all of this fun looks like too much work.
I would have scrolled past it, except I had been noticing something. Almost every conversation I half-overhear—in offices, over coffee, between meetings—circles around the last vacation or the next one. As if the rest of life is simply the connecting tissue between those two points.
That’s when the post hit differently.
The advice is well-meaning. Put joy on the calendar before life crowds it out. Make sure there is always something ahead—something that can’t be postponed, something the week must bend around. There is comfort in that idea.
And yet there is something faintly tiring about the thought that happiness needs a project plan. Bookings, itineraries, calendar blocks. Fun secured before the year fills up. It begins to feel like one more task in a life already full of them.
Somewhere along the way, fun has become closely tied to movement—to leaving, to going somewhere else. Happiness has quietly acquired a location: a beach, a mountain, a distant city. As if joy lives elsewhere and must be travelled to.
A curious arithmetic follows. Most of the year is spent moving through ordinary days while happiness is deferred to planned breaks from routine. When conversations drift to the last vacation or the next one, it’s as though joy has been outsourced—to geography, to novelty, to carefully planned interruptions of everyday life.
Scientists have a term for what keeps this cycle humming: anticipated memories. The quiet pleasure we feel today from imagining the memories we will enjoy tomorrow.
It helps explain why a vacation can feel exciting weeks before it begins, why the idea of a trip often feels better than the trip itself, and why advertisements never show you the full picture.
They show you the chilled beer, perfect and beaded with condensation. Sunlit beaches. Easy laughter. Young people suspended in golden light.
They don’t show you the immigration queue that barely moves. The security officer having a bad day. The suitcase that refuses to shut. The hotel pillow that gives you a crick in the neck. The meal that looked better on the menu than it tastes on the table.
Yet when you return, what do you remember?
“Such a great break.”
“We had the best time.”
“It was wonderful.”
The mind edits generously. The inconveniences fade. What remains is the story we prefer to tell—and to remember.
I began to notice this in myself too—how easily the mind jumps forward to the next pause, the next stretch of “real” living. How quietly the present week can begin to feel like something to be got through rather than inhabited.
Often the best part of a vacation is the period before it happens: the planning, the imagining, the gentle glow of something to look forward to. In a quiet way, anticipated memories borrow happiness from the future and bring it into the present.
None of this is an argument against vacations. They bring families together. They interrupt routine. They allow the phone to be put away and time to stretch a little. But I’ve been wondering whether some of that glow can be found inside ordinary days as well—a contentment that doesn’t demand a booking.
There’s also an older idea that has stayed with me over the years: that satisfaction doesn’t always come from escape, but from attention—from the care we bring to whatever sits in front of us. Writing a sentence carefully. Finishing a task properly. Making a cup of tea without rushing. When attention deepens, even ordinary work acquires texture. The day stops feeling like something to be endured and begins, quietly, to hold its own small satisfactions.
Perhaps it sits in small, unremarkable moments: a meal eaten slowly without urgency; a shower allowed to linger; the simple act of dressing without haste. The evening sky softening on the way home. The comfort of a familiar presence. The first sip of coffee taken without distraction. The passing theatre of a street. The faint chirping of a bird outside a window. Even the steady hum of an old machine doing its quiet work.
None of these moments require travel. None need reservations. They ask only for attention.
A vacation, after all, is simply a period where time feels less compressed and attention feels less divided. That feeling is usually produced by a change of scene. I’ve begun to suspect it can also be created by how a day is held.
The texture of ordinary days holds more than enough material for contentment—if it is allowed to register. The problem is not scarcity. It is speed. When life is tightly compressed, even pleasant moments arrive and leave before they are felt.
A small amount of space changes that.
One simple shift I’ve been experimenting with is making a little space in the day. Not elaborate rituals. Not complicated self-help. Just a small buffer—something as unglamorous as twenty unhurried minutes.
Twenty minutes so one thing doesn’t crash into the next. So the day has seams in it. Time to leave without rushing. Time to arrive without sliding in late. Time to sit for a moment before a meeting begins. Time to stretch between calls. Time to come home without the sense of having raced the clock.
Those minutes do not change the world. They change the experience of moving through it.
The idea of anticipated memories can also be turned toward an ordinary day. It is possible to begin the morning with a simple intention: today will be a good day. Not because nothing will go wrong, but because the mind can choose its stance before events begin to accumulate. Work will exist. Uncertainty will exist. Difficult people and unfinished tasks will exist. The question is whether the day will be lived once—or twice.
Why live a difficult moment twice—once in imagination and once in reality—when once will do?
The feed will keep serving up beaches and mountains and perfect light. The calendar will keep filling. The next break will always look wonderful from a distance.
But I’ve started asking myself, now and then, whether happiness truly lives only there—or whether it has been waiting quietly inside the hours we keep rushing through.
