Let’s pretend you just swigged back a cocktail I made you with a bunch of truth serum in it, so there will be no BS-ing of your answer. (👈 It tasted excellent and there was a very pretty garnish, FYI.) Where are you on my ultra-scientific “Intentional or Accidental Life” Spectrum?

How did it feel to pick your spot on the spectrum? (👈 Especially since you couldn’t lie about it, what with all that truth serum coursing through your system?) Were you like me—feeling a bit squeamish about how intentional you want to be yet busted by how lackadaisical you’ve become with life?

Take a look at this snippet from page 18 of my book, where I compare and contrast the difference between living like we mean it and living like we’re a wee bit dead inside:

Can I just reiterate that last point? It can be easy to fall asleep at the switch of life.

I know what autopilot looks like. It’s waking up on a Saturday and pressing replay on the same routines: eating the same Rice Chex breakfast, going for the same walk, working a bit, doing laundry, eating lunch, going to Trader Joe’s for salmon, making the salmon dinner, trying to prevent the kittens from climbing the curtains, failing at trying to prevent the kittens from climbing the curtains, watching a movie, hitting the hay.

I don’t want a rinse and repeat life though.

Edit that: I want some rinsing and repeating (a mindless routine can be undeniably comforting), but I don’t want it week in, week out. I don’t want to get to December and not feel like I had anything to show for the year… like I was a cameo in the movie of my life. I want the starring role! And I want an Oscar for said role, dammit.

I think you want to win your own Academy Award for your own life, too.

Most of us don’t choose an Oscarless, unlived life though, do we? We ~drift~ into one.

It happens quietly, through…

• Default calendars
• Overcommitting to please others
• Inherited expectations
• Living for weekends only
• Postponed dreams
• Staying silent to keep the peace
• Confusing busyness with meaningfulness
• Waiting to feel “ready”
• The seductive belief that “later” is a real place we’ll eventually arrive
• So. Many. More. Examples.

The days fill up. The years stack up. And suddenly our lives feel less like a story we’re authoring and more like a show we’re half-watching while scrolling on our phones.

Designing a life worth living is the opposite of that drift. It’s the intentional act of shaping how we spend our limited lives, based not on what’s urgent or expected, but on what’s meaningful.

Psychology has been making this case for decades.

Positive psychology helpfully distinguishes between hedonic well-being (pleasure, comfort, enjoyment, fun n’ fizzy like Prosecco) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning, purpose, growth, substantive and good-for-you like cold-pressed green juice). Research confirms we flourish most when our lives include both—but especially when we feel a sense of purpose and agency over how we live. Going through the motions may preserve comfort when we need/ want the zombie zone after a long week, but it often cuts meaning off at the knees.

One of the strongest predictors of well-being is autonomy—the feeling that our lives are self-directed rather than controlled by external forces (oh, like the way the wind is blowing). When we let life “just happen” to us, autonomy takes a back seat. When we ~deliberately~ design our routines, priorities, relationships, and boundaries, we sit up straight in the front row. It’s advisable to sit in the front freaking row of our lives.

Designing a life worth living doesn’t require a detonation dramatic reinvention or a one-way ticket to Tuscany (but don’t not go to Tuscany if you’ve been jonesing to move there; cheers me some Chianti, please). It starts with awareness. Self-regulation and goal pursuit research shows that those of us who reflect on our values and set intentional goals report higher life satisfaction and psychological health. Knowing why we do what we do changes how life feels while we’re doing it.

There’s also the issue of time, that annoyingly finite resource. When we’re reminded (even subtly) that time is limited, we tend to prioritize emotionally meaningful goals, relationships, and experiences over status or accumulation of Even More Things. Imagine if we knew our lives were temporary? Precious? How, then, would we design our lives to reflect this awareness? OKAY I AM NOT INTERESTED IN SUBTLETY: WE ARE ALL GONERS. SOME OF US WILL BE GONERS SOONER AND SOME OF US WILL BE GONERS LATER, BUT WE ARE ALL ON OUR WAY TO DEADSVILLE. HOW DO YOU WANT THIS LIFE TO GO BEFORE YOU’RE YANKED OUT OF IT?

With that little diatribe out of the way, let’s contrast all this Living Like We Mean It-ness with passive living. When we operate on autopilot, we optimize for efficiency, approval, or habit… but not fulfillment. We react instead of choose. Over time this can lead to what psychologists call existential boredom: that niggling sense that life is busy but somehow empty, full but somehow eerily hollow.

An astonishingly alive life isn’t rigid or perfectly optimized; it’s responsive. It makes room for joy, rest, growth, that Prosecco I mentioned earlier, and recalibration. It has us asking better questions of ourselves:

• What makes me feel alive?
• What drains me of energy?
• What would I regret not doing if time were shorter than I assume?
• What defaults am I succumbing to?
• Am I driving my career forward towards the roles I want, or am I waiting for spots to open up at the company I’ve already “put time into”?
• Am I choosing to make and foster friendships that fill me up with laughter and support, or am I going with the flow and keeping my existing wearisome friends because I’m confusing a shared history with real connection?
• Am I waiting to see what happens with X (the economy/ my marriage/ the housing market/ my weight/ the empty nest/ the weather/ etc.) before doing Y (moving/ starting the business/ renovating the kitchen/ going on a date/ traveling to Iceland/ etc.)?

Designing a life worth living isn’t so much about control as it is about care… care for how our days feel… care for what we’re building… care for the fact that this life we’re living is not a dress rehearsal.

Because life will happen to us either way, right? I guess the question is whether we plan to be awake for it.

If we don’t give two shits to make these Mondays intentional, what version of our lives will we accidentally live?

Oh my friend, we must avoid the accidental life at all costs. Let’s get out there and live like we mean it. I’ll start working on my Academy Award acceptance speech if you start working on yours?