Hope has a PR problem.
#pilot
On this week’s episode.
I have a Pinterest board called “Home.”
It’s beautiful apartments, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a wooden bookcase, and a reasonably priced yet cozy kitchen. There is always a mug of coffee, even though, for some reason, no one is ever drinking it. There is a dog and a cat sleeping by the window, and a desk where, in this alternate reality, I write important things.
None of it is mine.
The pets are probably going to happen whereas with the apartment, it’s all faith and prayer.
The Internet invents a new word every time it encounters a situation where it cannot comfortably accept normal human behavior. This time its,
Delulu.
Which is not entirely false, although the beauty of delulu is that it is often used in a fond, affectionate manner.
If you judged my life entirely on my Pinterest board, you’d think I’m one call away from the perfect life. Meanwhile, I’m standing in my kitchen making a cup of hot tea only to realize the milk has gone bad. Yeah, luck and I don’t go well.
We all have unrealistic hopes, dreams, goals, and ideas we’ll never, ever achieve. It’s the best way to make sure that no matter how bad things get, you’re always surprised when they do. Some of my Pinterest boards are an almost comically optimistic view of the future.
My Future Self has an apartment of her own, a writing career, a fluffy dog sitting on the couch, a pretty cat who’s sassy staring at the birds from the window, a set of coordinating ceramic bowls and plates, and plenty of natural light — somewhere in the mountains, but also in the city, but also in the countryside. You get it right?
My Present Self has no idea where her charger is. But what I’ve been thinking about is how nobody calls an Olympic gold medalist delulu when they win the race. No one mocks the writer whose book finally comes out, or the founder of a startup whose product becomes a huge hit. They don’t look at someone who made it and say, “Remember when they were delulu? That’s embarrassing.”
Once the truth is out, the reality is accepted. Funny how that works!
Belief has a fascinating relationship with reality. As soon as something believed in comes true, it’s no longer a delusion. The only thing that changes is the outcome.
I’ve always found this whole vision board thingy a little embarrassing.
Actually, no. That’s not entirely true.
I find mine embarrassing because what the hell was I thinking?
There's something oddly exposing about admitting that you've spent twenty minutes debating whether future you owns a green velvet sofa, or a cream linen. It's much easier to tell that you've made a five-year plan. But there’s a difference.
Telling someone you’ve got this whole other personality of you planning a future sounds tasteful. Responsible. Organized. Then there’s the side of you who’s a little embarrassed to admit to have spent a good thirty minutes deciding which imaginary sofa looked better on that imaginary living room of that imaginary house.
This reminds of me Phoebe’s infamous line, “Either everyone feels like this a little bit and they're just not talking about it, or I'm completely fucking alone.”
This is exactly why I think we’ve misunderstood vision boards. Most people think that these are manifestation tools. I’ve never found that explanation particularly convincing. If it did, then I would've have become a pop star, a vet, and inexplicably owned a horse from my 2016 vision board.
It did none of those things. To be fair, I thought the whole horse plan was a little out of my league, considering I grew up in a two bedroom house in the countryside of a small town. Between the vision boards, wanting a better life for myself, sending prayers and letters to the universe -it felt nice, in a way, but not exactly true to myself.
The strange thing is, I don’t think I was disappointed about the vision board’s lack of results per se. I think what had gotten me was the sense that it had failed in its most basic function; the assumption that I’d pinned enough pretty pictures of apartments and desks to my wall that it would somehow make them manifest in real life. In retrospect, I think that’s the problem with vision boards, in general, is that we expect too much from them.
But the older and w-i-s-e-r ( eye rolls) I got, I realized I was giving Pinterest a job which it never applied for. It was like dialing a customer helpline, telling the executive all my life problems.
“Tring! Tring! Hello?! I have some life problems that I’d like to get fixed instantly. How soon can the new life arrive?”
Executive on the other line, “Sure, we are happy to help… Your new life would arrive in 5-7 business days.”
And soon enough I knew I was becoming delusional. I had to snap out of it. But how? I too want a beautiful apartment with dim lights and muffled city sounds in the background, and thrift clothes and furniture off of Facebook marketplace and flea markets. Have a quiet life in a busy city with my dogs and cats. Write from wherever and whenever I want.
Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, you name it; people of my age have become founders, influencers, keynote speakers, building million dollar brands and companies, and I am not even done with breakfast, have laundry to finish from last week, wash my oily hair which is WIP since 4 days.
I don’t think people wake up one day and forget all about their dreams and goals. What about the life in present? We’ve got bills to pay, a job to go to so we can pay the bills we have to pay, maintaining relationships, sometimes even the ones we lowkey know are one argument away from breaking.
That's the part people forget. That we don't quit chasing ideas at some decisive moment. That we don't wake up one day and think, "You know what? I'm done settling for this." We slowly get busier. We keep postponing things we care about again, and again, and again. Eventually, we look up and realize we've excelled at existing in a life that barely existed at all.
See, that’s why I don’t really spend much time staring at those boards anymore.
They’re just... there.
Every now and again, I save a chair I can’t afford, an apartment in Copenhagen I definitely can’t afford, or a picture of a woman writing by a window, which somehow convinces me that I’ll magically become more disciplined if only I buy a window myself.
It’s objectively irrational, and I think the irrationality is what drew me to it in the first place. I don’t think it’s the irrationality that draws me to it now, though. I think it’s the things it reminds me not to forget.
There was a time when nothing in my life was going the way I wanted it to.
Not that it was some dramatic, movie-worthy disaster, but the everyday, mundane things weren’t panning out the way I’d hoped. Just one of those quiet, ordinary disappointments that stick with you. I was just getting really good at confusing movement with progress.
You could answer other people’s emails all day, but you know you’re avoiding the one conversation you’ve been rehearsing in your head for six months. You could feel like you’ve had a moderately productive week, but you’re still no closer to becoming the person you think you should be.
It wasn’t that the work wasn’t going well; it was more that the work wasn’t interesting. Not that there was no forward progress; more like not making decisions that made me feel like I was moving towards the person I wanted to become. It was one of those periods where I was making small, incremental choices in my day-to-day life that, on the surface of it, didn’t seem like much of anything at all.
Those are the dangerous periods, I think.
It’s not like one day you’re making big, bold statements about your future and the next day you’re deciding that maybe, just maybe, it’s too soon to make big, bold statements about your future.
It’s more gradual than that. One concession leads to another. One “Maybe I’ll do that later” leads to six months going by. It leads to a year. It leads to you quietly adjusting your expectations for yourself because they’ve always been a little bit higher than your circumstances allow for, and you start to think maybe, just maybe, your circumstances are the most important thing in the equation.
I think that’s what we’re really fighting against.
Not failure. Not even the lowering of our standards. It’s the quiet, creeping sense of defeat that comes with getting used to the idea that our circumstances define us.
That’s why I think we’re so quick to roll our eyes at vision boards.
Not because we genuinely believe the universe works that way—that somehow the more beige kitchens we pin to Pinterest, the more likely we are to find ourselves standing in the doorway of a real one.
I don’t think that’s it at all. I think it’s more that we only have so much bandwidth in our brains for the things we care about, and we’re constantly fighting against everything that distracts us from them.
We fight against the noise that distracts us from the signal. It’s surprisingly easy to spend a week surrounded by other people’s accomplishments and then realize you’ve completely forgotten what it was that you wanted for yourself.
A vision board, in a strange sort of way, interrupts that.
It interrupts the noise. It reminds you that there was a future you wanted for yourself before everyone else’s priorities crowded it out. I think that’s why we misunderstand the vision board. We think it’s about manifesting the things we want in life.
Maybe it’s not about manifesting the things we want. Maybe it’s about remembering the version of ourselves we wanted to become. Maybe it’s about staying pointed in the same direction, even when we’re not entirely sure where we’ll end up.
Psychologists have a less poetic name for this. They call it selective attention and goal salience. They’re dry terms for an important idea. Anything you decide is important begins occupying more of your attention—not because the world has changed, but because you have.
It’s why buying a red car suddenly convinces you to realize half the city owns one. Paint it red baby! Your attention shifted. The same thing happens with opportunities.
With books. With conversations. With careers.
The world doesn’t rearrange itself to fit you. You begin fitting yourself to notice a different version of the world.
Looking back, I don’t think my Pinterest boards made me more ambitious. They made me more consistent. They reminded me of a version of myself that I thought was worth becoming, and whenever I was having one of those days where I’d forgotten about that version of myself, they were there to remind me. Not because motivation is bad. It’s just unreliable. Mine disappears if I sleep bad one night. Or when I forget to set that very important alarm to wake up before its 9 a.m. to reach work.
Of course, none of this means life suddenly becomes easier. You still have to send the application. Write the chapter. Save the money. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Wake up and do the boring bits nobody posts about afterwards.
A vision board can’t do any of that for you. What it can do is make the next decision feel a little less random. Instead of asking, “What do I feel like doing today?” you start asking, “What would the person I’m trying to become do next?” They’re almost never the same answer.
I think that’s why the internet and I have a toxic relationship.
It presents me with infinite opportunities to aspire to, then makes me feel ridiculous for doing so. One second it’s telling me to think bigger, the next it’s making memes of anyone who does. Some twenty-two year old is showing her brand new NYC loft she bought from her seven-figure business selling digital products and paid collabs from brands I never heard of. And the next moment I’m told it's just ridiculous to have a vision let alone making a board on it. Make it make sense to me!
The internet loves ambition, progress, showing up and off but it likes it with the ending tied on. It’s a very strange place to ask for permission.
Perhaps we shouldn’t.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the biggest decisions in my life had a sort of delulu moment to them before they became inevitable. A career. A rented place in a bustling city far away from my small town. A cat with a perfect combo of girly and tomboy. A budding collection of vinyl across the world from some of my favorite artists and bands. Saying YES and NO without people pleasing.
At the time when this was all in my head with a cinematic background music playing, I never thought I’d make it. But I did. Long and behold, but I did.
I think we romanticize certainty because it makes for better stories. Nobody wants to hear “I had no bloody idea what I was doing, but I did it anyway” except that’s actually everybody‘s story. We’ve just agreed to conveniently skip over that part. Success has great PR value. Once it arrives, it revises the history of events and everybody starts thinking that it was bound to happen. It wasn’t.
Perhaps that’s why so many of us stop trying. Not because we stop wanting it. Because it’s exhausting to carry a future that no one else can see. It’s much easier to want what you already have access to. Much easier to mold your dreams to fit your circumstances than the other way around. One sounds sensible. The other sounds delulu.
I think we might have the wrong definition of delusion.
It implies a refusal to acknowledge reality. But the people I know who are building interesting lives for themselves are often the most realistic people in the room. They’re taking on second jobs. Applying for roles they know they’re probably underqualified for. Writing books after work. Budgeting meticulously. Waking up earlier than everybody else. Going to bed later than everybody else.
None of that sounds delusional to me. It sounds like an incredibly grounded determination. The only unusual thing is that they’ve refused to let their current circumstances become the limits of their imagination.
Maybe that’s why vision boards survive every cycle of internet irony. Because they give people somewhere to return. A quiet reminder that before life became busy, expensive, disappointing, exciting—or all of those things at once—there was a version of themselves that chose a direction. It’s quiet; less glamorous, frankly.
Sometimes that’s enough. Just enough to stop you drifting somewhere you never meant to go.
I still have that Pinterest board.
Some of the pins are removed because it didn’t make sense to me anymore. But I’ve added a set of new ones there. Because turns out I am not a beige girly after all. I like a pop of color too. It’s evident when I looked back at my childhood photo albums. I’ve always loved colors that make a pop in a simple room. My TDR list is longer than my ambitions now, just because I stepped out of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and actually dived into the world of literary fiction the world had to offer me.
Realized I don’t actually want some of the life I thought I wanted. That’s been useful too. Growing up isn’t just getting closer to your dreams. It’s discovering which dreams were never yours to begin with.
So no, I don’t think a vision board is going to change your life. I do think it can change what you pay attention to. And if you spend enough time paying attention to the same things, they have a quiet way of becoming the life you’re actually living. Probably not in the way you imagined. Probably not with the same beige sofa.
But often in ways that matter far more.
Perhaps that’s all delulu ever was. And perhaps we have simply used the wrong word. Perhaps it is not a delusion, but a rehearsal.
For life is something that must first be imagined before it can be lived. And some people have simply had enough of pretending that they are not still rehearsing.
Or perhaps all along, the real question wasn’t if your future could see you.
Perhaps it was if you could see it yourself before anyone else did.
Maybe I’m overthinking it.
Wouldn’t be the first time.
God, I hope it isn’t.
