What Can We Build Between the Life We Live and the Life We Want?

When having a break makes you feel guilty

For me, it appeared through work.

As the founder of Mae, much of my life moves between product ideas, meetings, decisions and problems that need to be solved. There is almost always something else I could be doing.

The work is connected to something I genuinely care about. That is also what makes stopping difficult.

That is also what makes stopping difficult.

Even when nothing forces me to work, taking an afternoon off can make me feel guilty. There is always the feeling that I could be doing something useful instead.

I have started realising, however, that continuously working doesn't necessarily make the work better.

So recently I have been forcing myself to stop sometimes. To read, go to the gym, spend time with people I care about, or simply leave the work unfinished until tomorrow.

Not because the ambition has disappeared.

Because stopping can be part of sustaining it.

And perhaps this is one of the first problems with the idea of arrival: when there is always something else to build, nobody tells you when you have done enough for today.

For Anja, the same tension appeared not through time, but through people.

What happens to the people we leave behind?

Anja's path has taken her from the venture capital world to building a successful cultural lab and now leading a cultural foundation.

As her life changed, some of her closest friendships changed with it.

She spoke about losing some of her best friends - people who had been close to her for years - and about having to grieve those relationships while continuing to move forward. We normally talk about growth in terms of what we gain.

A better opportunity. More responsibility. New people. New experiences. A different version of ourselves.

But becoming someone can also mean losing things that mattered deeply to us along the way.

Growth does not necessarily bring everything with it. Some relationships remain, others change, and some disappear. The difficult part is that moving towards something we want does not make those losses feel any less real.

Anja did not deny the sadness of that. What interested me was how she had started interpreting it differently.

“Other people would say it comes with costs. I would now say, no, it comes with a new Anja.”

The loss had not disappeared.

But she was doing something with it.

The grief became part of creating space for another version of herself, and eventually for other people to enter her life.

That shifted the conversation.

Because perhaps the uncomfortable feelings that accompany change are not always signs that we are moving in the wrong direction.

Sometimes they are part of what changing produces.

Then Amir questioned whether there was a destination at all.

What if there is no arrival?

Amir is an Iranian physical engineer living in Berlin.

His experience was simple: sometimes you reach what you thought you wanted and realise it wasn't actually what you wanted.

“What you thought you want is not actually what you wanted.”

And then something else appears.

Another goal. Another desire. Another version of life that seems closer to what you are looking for.

Maybe this does not mean we are failing to arrive.

Maybe there is simply no final arrival.

What we want changes because we change.

For Amir, the answer was not to stop wanting things, but to look more carefully at what he wants and why.

Some desires take us somewhere that feels healthy and meaningful. Others simply keep us moving.

So instead of asking when we will finally have everything we want, the question becomes much simpler:

What is actually worth wanting next?

Lisa brought the same question down to something even more immediate.

What if you don't know where you are going?

Lisa, a freelance advertiser and marketer, spoke about uncertainty and some of the unhealthy or self-destructive habits that could exist around it.

Her problem was not only choosing the right destination.

Sometimes it was not knowing the destination at all.

And when you cannot see the whole path, it becomes easy to stay where you are.

Her response was simple:

make one move.

You do not need to know exactly where everything is going.

You need to know what you can do next.

Amir was questioning the destination. Lisa was questioning the need to understand the whole journey before beginning it.

Together, those ideas made arrival seem less important.

Maybe the useful question is not Where will all of this eventually take me?

Maybe it is simply:

What is the next thing worth doing?

What can we build in-between our lives?

We started with Zong's paintings and the coexistence of two lives: the one visible from the outside and the one experienced inside.

During the conversation, another space appeared between them.

For me, it was the space between wanting to keep building and knowing when to stop.

For Anja, between the person she had been and the person she was becoming.

For Amir, between one desire and whatever comes next.

For Lisa, between not knowing where to go and deciding to make a first move anyway.

None of us had found a way to make these contradictions disappear.

What interested me more was that everyone was already building something inside them.

I was learning to use pauses to protect myself and the work I want to make.

Anja was turning grief into space for a different life and different relationships.

Amir was turning endless desire into a more conscious choice about what is worth pursuing.

Lisa was turning uncertainty into action.

Maybe this in-between is not empty space.

It is where we reconsider what matters, leave things behind, change direction and imagine something that does not exist yet.

Perhaps some of our creativity begins precisely there: between the life that already exists and the one we can imagine.

If everything already looked exactly as we wanted it to, there would be nothing to change. Nothing to question. Nothing new to build.

Zong's paintings gave us a way to enter that space.

The conversation filled it with work, guilt, friendship, grief, desire, uncertainty and action.

And by placing these experiences next to one another, something else became possible: we could use each other's ways of living to think differently about our own.

Maybe we never fully arrive.

But perhaps what matters is what we build in between.

This essay developed from a Mae Symposium held with Shuaitong Zong in her Berlin studio. I participated in and facilitated the conversation. The reflections emerged through the experiences shared in the room, using Zong's artistic practice as their starting point.