Bro, I think the reason we keep telling ourselves, “I'll start coding when I get into college”, is because the future looks ridiculously attractive from where we're standing right now.
And honestly, it makes sense.
When you're looking at the future from the present, you mostly see the pros.
You imagine college and think:
More freedom.
More independence.
More opportunities.
More time.
More people around you.
More resources.
And because you're not actually living that life yet, you don't really feel the downsides.
You don't feel the deadlines.
You don't feel the exhaustion.
You don't feel the responsibilities.
You don't feel how quickly a week disappears.
Those things are invisible from where you are right now.
And that's why the future feels so damn attractive.
You're comparing reality with imagination
That's the real trap.
Your current life is something you're actually experiencing, so you know all its annoying parts.
You know what's stopping you from coding today.
Maybe it's school.
Maybe it's exams.
Maybe it's your schedule.
Maybe you're just tired.
You can feel those limitations.
But when you imagine college, you don't imagine yourself being exhausted after classes, dealing with assignments or wasting an entire evening doing absolutely nothing.
You imagine yourself sitting in your room with a laptop, drinking coffee and building some insane project.
That's not really a fair comparison.
You're comparing:
The real present
vs.
the highlight reel of your future.
Of course the future wins.
And then responsibilities start stacking
The other problem is that as you grow older, you're not just replacing your current responsibilities with easier ones.
You're usually adding new ones.
School becomes college.
College becomes work.
Work comes with deadlines, commuting, meetings and responsibilities.
Then life adds more things: money, family, relationships, health, errands and countless small problems that you don't even think about right now.
And that's why the statement:
“I'll have more time later.”
is so dangerous.
You don't actually know that.
You're assuming future-you will have the same amount of free time you have today, except with more freedom and more resources.
You're calculating the benefits while ignoring the costs.
The cons of the future are hidden because you haven't experienced them yet
And that's what makes this whole thing so deceptive.
You can't really imagine being tired from a job if you've never worked full-time.
You can't understand how quickly evenings disappear until you've actually had a full day of responsibilities.
You can't know what it's like to have something important waiting for you every weekend.
You can imagine it intellectually, sure.
But imagining a problem isn't the same as experiencing it.
That's why the future feels lighter than it actually might.
Right now, all those future responsibilities are just concepts.
They don't have any emotional weight.
Meanwhile, your current responsibilities are sitting right in front of you.
So naturally, your brain goes:
“Future me will have it easier.”
Maybe.
But maybe future-you will just have different problems and less spare time.
That's why I don't trust “I'll do it later”
Not because later is always worse.
But because later is uncertain.
Today, you know exactly what you have.
Tomorrow, you don't.
And every year you wait, life has more opportunities to become complicated.
So if there's something you genuinely want to learn—coding, building projects, starting a business, learning a skill—I'd rather start badly today than make some beautiful plan for a future version of myself who may be much busier.
You don't need to sacrifice your entire life for it.
Just start.
Even a little.
Because the future will probably bring you more opportunities.
But it might also bring you more responsibilities.
And from where you're standing today, you can see the opportunities clearly.
The responsibilities?
You haven't felt them yet.
That's exactly why the future looks so attractive.
And that's exactly why you shouldn't assume it will give you more time.
One last thing: learn from people who are already there
If you really want to know what your future might look like, don't only listen to your own imagination.
Talk to people who are already living it.
Ask adults what they actually feel like after coming home from work.
Ask them how much energy they realistically have left.
Ask what they thought their life would look like at your age versus what it actually became.
Ask people who took the same career path you're considering where they ended up.
And most importantly, look around you.
Where does the average person from the path you're choosing actually end up?
Not the LinkedIn success story.
Not the one guy who became a millionaire at 23.
Look at the average.
What kind of job do they get?
How much do they work?
How much free time do they have?
What responsibilities do they have?
Are they still learning and building things after work, or are they mostly trying to recover from the day?
You don't have to blindly copy the average person.
But you should at least know what you're signing up for.
Because it's very easy to make decisions based on the life you hope you'll have.
It's much smarter to learn from people who are already living the life you're imagining.
Don't just ask, “What could my future give me?”
Ask:
“What will this future demand from me?”
That's the part we rarely think about when we're young.
And maybe that's why the future looks so damn easy from here.
This article was originally published by DEV Community and written by Sumit Mishra.
Read original article on DEV Community