The midlife ache usually arrives without an invitation, sitting on the chest like a cat that’s decided you are its permanent furniture. It’s a specific, haunting desire for something strictly impossible: your own life back. Not a better life. Not the glamorous "Option B" where you became a jazz pianist in Lyon or the CEO of a company that makes sustainable toothbrushes. Just the life you actually lived—the ordinary, slightly frayed one—returned to you so you could live it again.

It is a deeply odd thing to want. If you told a genie you wished for your life back, the genie would likely pause mid-incantation, squint at you, and ask if you’d perhaps misplaced the manual. We are conditioned to wish for the upgrade, the sequel, or the redemption arc. To wish for the rerun—exactly as it was, commercials and all—feels like a malfunction in the human machinery. Yet, as the years accumulate, the ambition for the unknown future starts to look pale and thin compared to the heavy, golden weight of the mundane past.

I got this idea from Hannah Sullivan. She’s a modern poet who captures this frequency with painful precision in her 2023 collection, Was It for This. Throughout the book, a refrain runs like a persistent, rhythmic pulse: I wanted all of it again to do again. Not to do differently. Not to dodge the embarrassments or edit out the mistakes. Just to do again. The Tuesday morning coffee in the mug with the chip on the rim. The humid, slippery chaos of a child’s bath time. The unremarkable Wednesday that, from a distance of a decade, turns out to have been the very center of the world.

The title of Sullivan’s collection is directly inherited from William Wordsworth. In the opening of The Prelude, his towering autobiographical masterpiece, Wordsworth finds himself paralyzed by a very recognizable brand of creative despair. He was the "chosen son" of British poetry; he had the talent, the pedigree, and the luxury of time. He was supposed to be writing a massive, world-altering epic called The Recluse.

Instead, he was sitting in the silence of his study, staring at a blank page and wondering if he had fundamentally squandered his soul. He looked back at his childhood in the Lake District—the hours spent wandering along the River Derwent, the way the beauty of the natural world had poured into him when he was young and porous—and he felt a sudden, sharp panic.

“Was it for this,” he asks, “that one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song?”

It’s a question of ROI—Return on Investment. Was all that wonder, that unearned grace, given to him only to result in this sterile, midlife silence? For Wordsworth, the question became the trapdoor. By asking what all those early gifts were for, he began to remember them in such excruciating detail that the act of remembering became the poem itself. He stopped trying to write the "Great Epic" and accidentally wrote the story of his own mind. The despair didn't just unlock the autobiography; it became the fuel.

Sullivan performs a brilliant act of translation on Wordsworth’s question. She takes it—originally a question about high poetic vocation—and makes it universal. In her hands, it is no longer about whether you have fulfilled your artistic destiny. It is about the terrifying, silent passage of ordinary time.

It’s about the way life accrues and then, suddenly, has accrued. It’s the moment of realizing that the "footage" of your existence is already shot, edited, and stored in a vault, and you weren't actually paying attention to half of it. One critic noted that Sullivan makes Wordsworth’s question “bruisingly existential.” That feels right. It shifts the inquiry from "What have I achieved?" to "Where was I while my life was happening?"

Was it for this? The four thousand morning commutes where you rehearsed imaginary arguments in your head? The thirty thousand sinks full of dishes? The endless, flickering stream of emails that felt like urgent dispatches but were mostly just digital noise? The years that didn't feel like years while they were passing, but now feel like a vanished continent?

Think of this idea of "footage." Imagine your life is being filmed—not for an audience, not for a social media feed, but strictly for a private screening much later. The camera rolls constantly, capturing the grand occasions, of course—the weddings where the cake was too dry, the promotions, the big trips—but it also captures the "background noise." It records the scenes you didn't even realize were scenes.

Years from now, when you are desperate to return to this current period of your life, all you will have is what the camera caught, and truthfully, just a set of reels that the mind remembers. And here is the sobering truth: you don’t get to choose afterward which moments mattered. You only get to choose now whether you are present for them.

We currently live in a world that treats attention as a commodity to be mined, but we rarely discuss the personal cost of that extraction. Every time you outsource your attention to a screen during a "boring" moment—waiting for the kettle to boil, sitting in the school pickup line—you are essentially turning the camera away from your own life. A life lived distractedly is a life with hours of footage where the camera was pointed at the floor.

Conversely, a life lived with attention, with our modern “mindfulness,” even without a constant feeling of "meaning," is a life with material. It is rich, usable, ache-inducing material. This is the distinction between two kinds of work: the impossible and the possible.

The impossible work is trying to feel the "preciousness" of the present moment in real time. We’ve all tried it—sitting at a dinner table, squinting at our loved ones, and mentally screaming, "Remember this! This is a Core Memory!" It almost never works. You cannot manufacture nostalgia for something while you still possess it. Nostalgia is remarkable that way; it requires the vacuum of absence and time.

The possible work is simply the discipline of "attendance." It is staying in the room, staying at the table, and saying the obvious thing because it’s true. Feeling what you can. The enjoyable aching for this moment comes later. The attendance is required now.

This brings us to the pivotal moment in Sullivan’s work involving a chocolate cake. In one of her poems, the narrator’s mother asks what she wants for her birthday. Internally, the narrator is vibrating with that impossible wish: I wanted all of it again to do again. She wants the past restored. She wants the "all."

But what she says out loud is: "I’d love a chocolate cake."

At first glance, this looks like a heartbreaking compromise—the existential equivalent of being offered the secrets of the universe and asking for a coupon for a car wash. The vast, unanswerable desire for the totality of life is traded for something humble, sugary, and proximate. No one writes a sonnet about responding to the abyss with a grocery-list item.

And yet, it is the highest form of wisdom. The grand longing—I want all of it again—has no answer. There is no one to ask and no action to take. It is a beautiful, useless sentiment that keeps you awake at 2:00 AM but leaves you paralyzed at 2:00 PM.

The chocolate cake, however, is answerable. It is something her mother can actually do. It is a gesture that can be performed, a cake that can be eaten, a physical manifestation of love that leaves crumbs on the plate. By asking for the cake, she creates a new "scene." She ensures that one day, years from now, when her mother is gone and the kitchen is quiet, she will have footage of this specific, sugary grace.

The cake isn't the consolation prize for not being able to repeat your life. The cake is the prize. The humble, answerable thing becomes the precious thing because it is the only thing we can actually hold.

Sullivan concludes her collection with an image of a moth spreading its wings before a lit window. She writes about "the flashiness of staring down tomorrow"—the quiet, underrated bravery of continuing to face forward, even when you are acutely aware of how much of your "footage" is already behind you.

This is not optimism, exactly. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. This is something more durable: it is the recognition that the question Was it for this? has a definitive answer.

The answer is: Yes.

Yes, it was for this. For the chocolate cake. For the Tuesday commute where the light hit the trees just right. For the unremarkable Wednesday that felt like a burden but was, in fact, the "whole thing."

We cannot feel the nostalgia for our lives while we are living them. That’s just not how the physics of the heart works. But we can build a life worth being nostalgic for. We don't do this by chasing "peak experiences" or Instagrammable vistas. We do it by the simple, radical act of showing up. By letting the dinner run long. By putting the phone in the other room. By saying yes to the chocolate cake.

The camera is rolling right now, on a scene you don’t yet know is important. One day, you will wish you could live this exact, mundane moment again. You can’t. But you can have it now—fully, attentively, with the camera pointed at something worth keeping.

This version of your life isn't the backup plan, and that’s the entire point.

John

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