Do you feel like most of your life has been doing things you didn’t want to do?

~Every… freaking… moment. From 4 years old till 13 where I learned not to give a dam as much. I’m still just doing an artificial to do list , day by day, instead of living life spontaneously., In the moment.

Excellent question thanks.

In junior high I showed up to class for tests and videos, and slept in until my class was teaching something that I was interested in. I was free to eat and sleep when I wanted to .

I would watch tv porn radio and play Nintendo all night and sleep during the day.

@RedDeerGuy1 Funny you say that, I always have an ongoing To-Do list in my head, too. I like to think it keeps me focused and on point, but it also causes some anxiety.

Decades of working were not wholly awful but of course, given the choice, it would have been nice not to have to commute and deal with work for 7 or 8 hours a day plus a commute. When I think about years of being stressed out about work and having a small child, those years are gone (years of her being little).

Not really. I do remember being on the school bus on beautiful spring days and passing a green field and wishing I could hop out and spend the day there but that was an occasional feeling. Certainly there were demands when my kids were young but I had chosen to raise them.

And now that I am single again and retired and privileged enough to live comfortably, I pretty much do whatever I want most of the time.

I’ve certainly had traumatic events in my life that affected me but I can’t say I haven’t had plenty of opportunities to choose what I want to do.

Absolutely not. I have followed my dreams and followed my desires my whole life.
Life is too short to do anything less. Even when I was going through tough times or divorce, it was an act of doing things in a controlled path that I owned.
Traveling in nature with family is a long running theme that stands out. Early on I have great memories of traveling as a child with my parents and siblings on camping trips. Month long bike or canoe outings as a teen and early 20’s. Ski trip with family from teens to now. Random road trips simply fill my brain with adventures in complete control of a destination that changed.
It’s all about the journey. Even when wandering, I am in control of it doing the things I want to do.

We all have moments in life when you do things you don’t want to do. Thats just the way the ball bounces. Applies to both children and adults. And oldsters like me. And sometimes it might actually be lifesaving. A few years ago, I took a nasty fall at work, and evidently the bump on my head had me acting wonky. According to my wife and daughter and eldest grandson anyway. I thought they were all full of crap, but they insisted on taking me to a hospital, got there and was taken in for emergency surgery, bleeding on the brain. Docs told me that if my family hadn’t acted so quickly, I’d have died. So sometimes being coerced into doing something is in your best interests. On the way home after my release, I told my daughter I would never have gone if I had been in my right mind, nobody is cutting me open. She told me, “Daddy, weren’t in your right mind, you were acting goofy.”

No really.

When I was a kid, particularly starting at age ten, I had a truckload of freedom — almost to the point of neglect. I chose to go to vocational high school, chose and paid for my own college. The upside of your parents not really caring what you do is oodles of freedom.

After I got married, I’ve had more instances of doing things out of obligation for my family, but that’s a role I chose. I did let it go too far for a while, where I was taking on many of my wife and daughter’s responsibilities. They frankly, took advantage of me and I let it happen for too long. I’ve now made efforts to correct that.

Otherwise though, no — I’ve mostly sailed my own ship as it were.

It’s been a strange life in that I never figured out what I really wanted to do. But I really lucked out in rarely being involved for long with anything I truly despised or feared. In my dotage I now spend an inordinate amount of time with nothing better to do than dwell on the past and my life of uncanny luck, a life I seem to have stumbled through aimlessly with one lucky break monotonously following another, all of which I took for granted as the natural order of things. It just doesn’t make sense. Even as a kid, mean people treated me decently, and opportunities I didn’t appreciate would fall from the sky on my clueless head. People would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and would just laugh when I told them I had no interest in growing up because it looked like a bum deal. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, so it’s been a life of doing more or less what I pleased, and if tiring of it, doing something else. And against what should be impossible odds, I not only got away with it, but actually prospered. It’s unbelievable and I believe would be impossible to pull off had I been born anytime or anywhere else.

Well, I often “feel like it”, but I recognize it as a chronic complaint pattern of mine, ever since school and especially the onset of homework.

Many of my habitual thoughts and feelings were organized around that complaint. It has had various emotional payoffs, and while it has been mostly an inauthentic and dysfunctional complaint that in the end has consumed much of my time and energy, I’ve also developed some useful abilities within that mindset. It does have some grains of truth to it.

More valuably, it also gave me a habitual focus on trying to get as much opportunity as possible to do what I do want to do, and to a large extent, I’ve succeeded.

But I’ve come to see the argument as a habitual ego-defending and resentful thought pattern, which at this point I would like to be free of.

“Did you have short or long times in your life where most of your day was doing things you enjoyed?”
– Yes. I’ve made a point to get as many of these as I can, and to enjoy them, although I have also seen that perhaps my core fear is getting that opportunity, and then failing to choose (or even to truly know) what I want to do with it, and squandering that opportunity.

“Or, did you or do you feel like you’re constantly doing things you don’t want to do hoping for small pay-offs of the things you really want to do?”
– Sometimes. This is one of the worst parts of that habitual thought pattern.

“If you are willing to share, describe your favorite times in your life.”
– I’ve had many great times. The best were mostly when I felt at liberty to do what I wanted, and was doing that, and didn’t feel a shadow of other responsibilities and obligations.

“What do you love to do?”
– Wandering around exploring interesting places. Travelling. Creating and playing interesting games which involve situations in imaginary worlds (and exploring them). Stories, dreams. Intimate conversations with flowing communication, and the sharing experiences with people. Connecting with animals and the natural world. Love. Reading, learning, and good lectures and seminars, especially without homework.

“What did you dislike doing, but had to do it on a regular basis?”
– Homework, and tedious unwelcome exercises and assignments. Middle School P.E.. Forced poetry. Writing assignments when I wasn’t inspired. Jobs on uninteresting tasks for the profits of companies I didn’t like. Tax forms. Financial aid forms. Most other forms.

I retired eight and a half years ago. No house payment, no car payment. Good retirement income. Good medical.
From the age of 12 I have had a job. I always had to work to support my life. Many of the jobs were difficult.
To be here, now, is a blessing.

Not adulthood.

I spent most of my life just surviving, working to live,upgrading Education with Student loans,and the cosequences of having loans during bad economic downturn ( 1980’s) to finally say that in retirement I am free to decide what, where, when I do things of interest or just have a nice peacefull day.

Reitement is not bad at all if you had taken care of your body in a healthy way and by retirement you are set to create the life that you always wanted.

My choices not anothers dicatate my life now and loving it.
Love constant learning something new ongoing.

Quite a lot of ebb and flow with that for me. I’m a hands on guy, I like to get outside and sometimes get dirty. I worked plenty of labor jobs like loading boxes, some construction, fast food up until I was like 21. In my 20’s I was a field technician and I traveled all over the southeast doing environmental monitoring work using all kinds of fancy scientific toys. We worked in power plants, ran up and down rivers and lakes in boats, put things out on mountainsides and on dams. It paid well and was great and so far that’s been the best time I have had. I knew my body would not be able to take that forever so I took a job that was similar but did not require much travel and allowed me to get an engineering degree. That was a lot of work to both, like really a lot. I did enjoy some of the classes, projects and work so I was still pretty content. Now, in my mid-40’s I’m a little further up the food chain with more responsibility and a lot less adventure. These days moving up the chain means getting additional degrees, certifications and other accolades so I still work on that stuff. I don’t like it but that’s just what it takes. Currently I’m 95% in the office. It’s my fault too. I thought I’d be ready to plant myself behind a desk after years of crawling out from underneath equipment but that’s just not the case yet and I may hit retirement age before I get tired of that sort of thing.

Well. Good Q.

I have lived a truly privileged life!

Now at 30 I am committed to months of coding to fix…

I hate hate it!