In the spring of 2019, I sat in a coffee shop with a new notebook and wrote my five-year plan. I remember it vividly, because the coffee cost more than I expected and I took that personally. I still do. It costs more now.
The plan was beautiful. It had headings. It had a timeline drawn with a ruler I bought specifically for the occasion. It was the most confident document I have ever produced, including my CV, which is also fiction, but legally.
I found the notebook last week, in the drawer. You know the drawer. Here is what it said, and what happened instead.
Year One: “Get promoted.”
I did not get promoted. My job title changed from “Coordinator” to “Associate” in a restructure, which came with no pay rise, a new email signature and the feeling of being moved sideways on a chessboard by someone who was also moving sideways, towards the exit.
I listed it on LinkedIn as a promotion. Eleven people congratulated me. Nine were bots. One was a recruiter for a job in a city I’ve never visited. The last was my old manager, who’d been let go in the same restructure and was congratulating everyone, to stay visible.
Year Two: “Run a half marathon.”
I bought the trainers. I downloaded the app. I ran, I believe, three times. On the third run, a man walking a very old dog overtook me. Not intentionally. The dog just had more left in it than I did, and it was fourteen.
I did not run the half marathon. I became extremely good at making bread instead, which was not on the list. Nobody asked me to. It just happened, the way most things in your life happen: unplanned, unpaid, and noticed only by you.
The plan was a map of a country I never visited. The bread was the only thing that rose.
Year Three: “Buy a house.”
I looked at houses online. Hundreds. I formed strong opinions about kitchen islands for a man who rents a kitchen the width of a coffin, and pays for it like it’s a cathedral. I bookmarked a cottage with a blue door and looked at it every few weeks the way people look at photos of an ex who’s doing better.
The cottage sold. The new owners painted the door grey. Grey, like the deposit I will never save, like the hair I didn’t have in 2019. My landlord, meanwhile, bought his third flat. Mine helped.
Year Four: “Learn Italian. Travel more. Read 50 books.”
By year four I was stacking goals like plates at a buffet, as if more of them would make the earlier ones feel less abandoned. They didn’t. They just made a bigger stack of things I didn’t do.
I learned to say “a coffee, please” in Italian and have never needed it. I travelled once, to a wedding, where I sat next to a man who explained his five-year plan through most of the main course. He was on year six. He’d achieved all of it. He had a boat. He was younger than me. The couple divorced before I’d finished paying off the train ticket.
I read eleven books. Four were about productivity. None helped. One was the same book as another, with a different cover, and I didn’t notice until page 140. That’s two weeks of my one life, read twice.
Year Five: “Be happy.”
Past me put this last. As if happiness were the reward for completing the other four. As if it were a level you unlock after finishing the main game, rather than a thing you mostly notice afterwards, in photos, when it’s gone.
I got none of it. Not the promotion, not the medal, not the cottage, not the Italian. In the gap between the plan and the years, things happened I never wrote down. A café learned my order. Two friends moved abroad and became a group chat. I made bread for a neighbour having a bad week, and she cried, and I panicked, and she moved out in spring, and the new neighbour doesn’t eat bread.
None of it was in the notebook. Most of it is already over.
Nobody ever wrote “accidentally find a café where they know your order” in a five-year plan. They should. It’ll be the best thing that happens to you all year, and then it’ll close.
So, Should You Make a Plan?
Sure. Plans are lovely. They are weather forecasts written by an optimist who won’t be there when it rains. They give you something to aim at, so you can watch yourself miss it in high definition.
Just don’t mistake the plan for the life. The plan was written by a person sitting in a coffee shop on one afternoon, with no idea what was coming. That person was very confident. That person bought a ruler. That person thought “five years” was a unit of time you simply received, like post, rather than something taken from you in installments, on Tuesdays, mostly in meetings.
I’ve started a new notebook. On the first page, I wrote one line for the next five years:
“See what happens.”
It’s the first plan I’m certain I’ll stick to. The universe is going to do it anyway. I’ve just stopped pretending I’m consulted.