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Yearning for another life is avoidance
Late bloomers see the shadows of the future dancing around them: a wife, kids, family, a stable career. These are valid goals and a valid concern when they seem distant. Dwelling on them can still be a way of resisting negative sensations, which shows up as an intense yearning for a different life.
What a person wants and what is happening don't align, and fear and anxiety describe that gap in the present, not the past or the future. Sitting with the negative sensations and then carrying on matters more than asking what can go right or what went wrong.
A daydream of an ideal future makes every real step toward it feel like a failure, since the fantasy comes with thousands of steps already taken.
Why does pushing a thought away bring it back?
In 1987 Daniel Wegner asked students to say whatever came to mind for five minutes while trying not to think of a white bear, ringing a bell each time the bear came up. On average they rang it more than once a minute. When they were afterward told they could think of the bear, those who had suppressed it thought of it more often than a group never asked to suppress it. Wegner called this the rebound effect.
Why do positive daydreams about the future backfire?
Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues found that positive fantasies about the future predicted less effort and poorer results, including in a 2002 paper with Thomas Mayer that followed graduates searching for jobs. Oettingen explained that the fantasy lets the mind enjoy the goal as if it were already reached, which lowers the energy to pursue it. In a 2011 study by Kappes and Oettingen, positive fantasies were linked to lower systolic blood pressure, a physical marker of energy.
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