Two Travelers, One Life: Why Some People Burn Out and Others Don’t
Why You Can’t Solve Life—But You Can Solve Today, and What That Realization Frees You to Finally Carry (and Leave Behind)
Let me tell you a story.
Two people are sent on a long journey. Each is given the same starting kit: a map, a satchel, and enough provisions to begin. But they move through the journey with entirely different philosophies.
The first traveler walks with a quiet kind of trust. When the road gets steep, she pauses, breathes, and climbs. She doesn’t pretend the journey is easy—she just doesn’t add extra weight to it. She assumes that not every answer needs to be immediate. That confusion and hardship might be part of the design, not a flaw in it. When the sun blazes, she rests in the shade. When it rains, she lets herself get wet and laughs a little at the absurdity. She accepts the discomfort as part of the passage. And when she stumbles, she doesn’t spiral. She adjusts. She keeps going.
The second traveler takes every bump in the road personally. Every detour feels like punishment. He doesn’t just walk the path—he argues with it. He questions the placement of every stone, suspects every turn, checks the map obsessively until it blurs. He replays old mistakes and pre-suffers future problems. He thinks his over-analysis will give him control. But all it gives him is exhaustion. His provisions spoil because he's too anxious to eat. He avoids resting, convinced it’ll put him further behind. Ironically, it’s his resistance that slows him down.
Same path. Same tools. Same storms. But only one learns how to travel lightly enough to make it through with peace.
Because the journey doesn’t just test your endurance. It reveals how you carry yourself when you don’t know what’s next.
The Hidden Weight We Carry
Let’s sit with this story for a moment.
Most of us are trained to be the second traveler. Especially in high-stakes, high-cognition jobs like engineering. We simulate every scenario. We optimize. We brace. And in doing so, we often exhaust ourselves before the real work even begins. We think that if we just stay tense enough, nothing bad will catch us off guard. But that tension becomes the very thing that slows us down.
A backend engineer might spend more time worrying about how a future outage will reflect on their performance review than actually investigating the issue at hand. A manager might mentally draft five versions of a tough conversation before ever scheduling it—burning energy that could've gone toward clarity or curiosity. We’re not just carrying the work—we’re carrying our fear of how the work will be perceived.
And it’s not limited to professional life. Imagine someone preparing for a big family gathering. They want everything to go smoothly. They replay last year’s awkward conversations. They worry about who might clash, what might be said, or what judgment might quietly be passed. By the time guests arrive, they’re already depleted—because they’ve been mentally living through ten versions of the event that haven’t even happened.
What if the weight isn’t in the road itself, but in how we walk it? What if clarity, presence, and even joy come not from solving every possible problem in advance—but from choosing to walk the road one step at a time, with just today’s load on your back?
Don’t Carry What’s Not Yours (Yet)
There’s an old idea—shared across spiritual and philosophical traditions—that much of our suffering doesn’t come from reality itself, but from time-traveling in our heads.
And here’s a mindshift most of us overlook: The past doesn’t always have to be a source of regret or self-blame. It can also be a source of earned relief.
Instead of reliving old pain or replaying what went wrong, we can look at the past like a mountain we already climbed. The bruises are real. The scrapes were painful. But we’re on different ground now. We can feel the lightness of having made it through.
It’s like stepping out of a long storm into sunlight. If you keep obsessively watching the dark clouds you just passed, you’ll miss the warmth you’re standing in now.
Hardship doesn’t just leave scars—it also leaves evidence that you survived. That you adapted. That you moved forward.
The challenge is remembering to let those memories fuel gratitude, not rumination.
We revisit the past to relive regrets. We leap into the future to forecast disasters. And we overlook the only time zone we can actually operate in: the present.
Here’s how one old thinker framed it:
“Don’t shoulder the weight of yesterday, today, and tomorrow all at once. Just carry today.”
Planning is wise. Worrying is heavy. The trick is knowing which one you’re doing.
Let’s Ground It in Reality
Let’s take a real example. You’re an engineering lead. Your team’s behind on a critical migration, you’ve had back-to-back difficult one-on-ones, and your manager seems distant lately. A partner team wants answers, and you’re already bracing for a future meeting that hasn’t even been scheduled yet.
Now add this: you’re still carrying a sense of failure from a project that slipped six months ago. It keeps replaying in your head like a bad song on loop. But here’s the shift—what if that failure wasn’t an indictment, but evidence? Proof that you survived, learned, and kept going? Like walking out of a storm and realizing, only after the clouds clear, that you’re still standing.
When you see the past that way—not as baggage, but as background—you reclaim today. And that changes how you show up. Less fear. More clarity.
But clarity has a cost: attention. And we often give ours away to timelines we don’t live in.
Your calendar says it’s Wednesday. But your head is in Monday’s debrief and Friday’s confrontation. Of course you’re exhausted. You’re living a three-day life in a one-day body.
What if you just did Wednesday?
Not in a soft, romantic way. In a clear, brass-tacks kind of way. What does today actually ask of you? What’s the conversation, the ticket, the decision that belongs to this 24-hour window? That’s what you carry. Set the rest down.
This isn’t just for work. Maybe you’re a parent and you’re sleep-deprived and overstretched. The baby’s teething. You haven’t done the laundry. There’s a note from school you haven’t opened. Or maybe you’re a student, overwhelmed by readings and applications and the low hum of wondering if you’re even doing any of it right.
You don’t need to fix your whole life.
You need to respond to one message. Or change one diaper. Or push one commit. Then rest. Then repeat.
Clarity doesn’t come from controlling everything. It comes from narrowing your field of vision until it only holds what matters right now.
That’s how you start to feel capable again. Not by solving life. But by solving today.
A Mental Model for Sanity
Think of your mental space like a backpack. Some things belong there—others don’t.
When you carry the past, you’re often shouldering regret. "I should’ve…" thoughts sit like heavy stones. They can’t be acted on, only relived. And yet, we carry them like they’re helping.
The future? That’s usually filled with "What if…" thoughts. Lighter than regret but relentless. They’re like balloons tied to your backpack—always tugging upward, distracting you from the ground beneath your feet.
Only the present—the "What’s next?" moments—offer a handle. Something to grab, to hold, to do. They might still be difficult, but they’re real. And real is manageable.
So before you move forward, check your load. Are you carrying memories you’ve already lived through? Worries that haven’t happened yet? Or just today’s task, today’s ask, today’s moment?
Most of us are bent under the weight of things that don’t even belong to this day. No wonder it’s hard to stand upright.
And here’s the deeper shift: your mind is a tool, not a master. It’s brilliant at tracking, predicting, rehearsing—but it’s not built to lead. When you let it run without guidance, it drags you back to the past and forward to imagined disasters. But when you use it deliberately—when you choose what to focus on—it becomes your sharpest ally.
Use your mind. Don’t be used by it. That’s the quiet skill that turns noise into clarity.
A Closing Thought
There’s a freedom in not needing to solve everything at once.
There’s a kind of clarity that comes from just carrying what’s in front of you.
Some call it mindfulness. Some call it surrender. Some call it wisdom. Whatever name you give it, the practice is the same:
Stop living in every timeline at once.
The road gets easier—not because the terrain changes, but because you do.
That's really good article, Thanks Tarik