The Guilt of Wanting More

I want to talk about a feeling that doesn’t show up in the pretty posts, because I think more people carry it than admit it: the guilt of wanting more than a good life.

”But you guys have everything”

When we started telling people we were leaving, the reactions sorted into two piles. Some were shocked. Others were just confused. And the confused ones almost always said some version of the same thing:

“What? You guys have everything. Everything’s amazing. It’s perfect.”

And here’s the thing — they weren’t wrong. We did have everything you’re supposed to want. A beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood. A gorgeous yard. Parks and trails. Two healthy kids. A business that worked. Family close by. On paper, we had the whole picture.

So what do you even say to that? How do you explain that you want to walk away from the picture everyone’s working their whole life to paint?

Most of the people I love just don’t have the bug

I’ve thought a lot about why this was so hard to talk about, and I landed on something. A lot of the people I love most just haven’t traveled much, and it’s not a flaw in them — it’s just not their thing. The travel bug never bit them. They’re genuinely, deeply comfortable staying in one place for a long time. And that’s fine. That’s a wonderful way to live and I mean that with my whole heart.

But it means that when I tried to explain the pull I was feeling, I was describing a hunger they’d never felt. Their advice came from a place of real love and care and comfort — “why would you give up something so good?” — but it was coming from a different operating system than mine.

Brian and I just want adventure. We want every day to be a little bit different. We want to keep experiencing new things. That’s not better than wanting stability. It’s just different, and the difference was hard to bridge with people who wanted the opposite for us out of love.

The guilt I didn’t expect

And here’s the part I really want to be honest about, because it surprised me: I started to feel guilty. Guilty for being excited. Guilty for wanting a more alternative life when the conventional one was right there, fully built, paid for, beautiful.

It’s a strange kind of guilt. Nobody’s doing anything wrong. You have a good life and you want a different one, and somehow wanting the different one feels like an insult to the good one. Like you’re being ungrateful. Like you’re telling everyone who’s happy with the picture that the picture isn’t enough.

It took me a while to untangle that. We weren’t leaving because our life was bad. We were leaving because we were trying to find our true peace and happiness as a family — to figure out where we, the four of us, are actually our best selves. And we’d started to get glimpses of it. Once you’ve seen your family at its best somewhere, it’s very hard to unsee.

What I’d tell you if you feel it too

If you’re sitting in a good life feeling guilty for wanting a different one, I want to say the thing I needed someone to say to me: wanting more isn’t ungrateful. You can be deeply thankful for what you have and still know it isn’t the shape your one life is supposed to take.

The people who love you and don’t get it aren’t wrong, and you’re not wrong. You’re just wired for something they’re not wired for. You don’t owe anyone an apology for the way you’re built.

I still feel a flicker of that guilt sometimes, honestly. But I’ve stopped letting it drive. The goal was never to escape a bad life. It was to go find the best version of our family — and you can’t find that by feeling guilty for looking.

— Katie