The Someday List: Why We Keep Deferring Our Own Dreams (And How to Stop)

brian@somniam.com (Brian Beane) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:02:20 GMT

You know the list.

Maybe you have never written it down. Maybe you have, in a notebook that found its way to a drawer, or in the Notes app on your phone, filed somewhere between the grocery list and a half-drafted text you never sent. But the list exists. It has probably existed for years.

Learn to sing. Walk the Camino. Take that trip to Portugal. Finally try painting. Get back on a bike. Volunteer somewhere that actually needs you. Pick up the guitar that has been leaning against the bedroom wall since your youngest graduated college.

Someday.

There is nothing wrong with having that list. What matters, and what psychology has been quietly documenting for decades, is why so many of us carry it without acting on it. Not because we are lazy. Not because we have given up. But because the human brain has a remarkably sophisticated set of reasons for keeping us exactly where we are.

Understanding those reasons is the first step toward doing something about them.

What the Someday List Actually Is

The Someday List is not a failure of ambition. It is evidence of it. Every item on that list represents something you once cared about enough to notice, to name, to hold onto. The list is a map of who you wanted to be, and in many cases, still do.

The problem is not the list. The problem is the word that precedes everything on it.

Someday is a word that sounds like hope but functions like a lock. It defers the question of when. And without when, someday belongs to no one — not to you, not to any version of you that actually exists in time. Psychologists have a name for this disconnect: future self-continuity, or rather, the lack of it.

The Future Self Problem

Research published in the Annual Review of Psychology has found that most people experience their future selves not as a version of themselves, but as a stranger. When you imagine the person who will finally take the trip to Portugal, or finally learn to sing, that person feels curiously abstract, distant, and separate from the you who is reading this right now.

Studies from ScienceDirect have shown that the weaker your sense of connection to your future self, the more likely you are to procrastinate on things that matter to your long-term fulfillment. The present self gets the comfort. The future self gets the promise. And the future self, being abstract, has no vote in today's decisions.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature of how human brains process time. The you of five or ten years from now is neurologically categorized more like a stranger than like you. And we are not very good at doing hard things for strangers.

The practical consequence: every time you put something on the Someday List, you are handing it to a version of yourself you have never met, and expecting them to handle it. It is a generous intention. It rarely survives contact with reality.

The Tyranny of the Familiar

Even when we want to move, something keeps us still. Behavioral economists call it status quo bias, and it runs deep.

The short version: we are wired to feel the pain of change more acutely than the pain of staying put. A decision to act and fail feels worse than a decision to not act at all — even when inaction leads to the same outcome. This is sometimes called regret avoidance. We stay with what we know not because it is good, but because it is ours, and familiar, and at least predictable in its disappointments.

For adults who have spent decades building a particular life, this pull is especially strong. The routines are real. The identity is established. The Someday List sits just outside the frame of daily life, not quite forgotten, not quite possible.

Here is the quiet cost of that arrangement: a landmark study by palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware, who spent years sitting with people in the last weeks of their lives, found that the single most common regret among the dying was this: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

Not the things they did. The things they did not.

Status quo bias does not feel like a bias when you are inside it. It feels like being reasonable. It feels like waiting for the right time. It feels, with uncanny precision, like telling yourself: someday.

The Paradox of Too Many Choices

There is another piece of this worth naming, because it is particularly relevant to anyone looking at a long list of deferred interests and wondering where on earth to begin.

Research on choice overload — first documented by psychologists Barry Schwartz and Sheena Iyengar — consistently shows that when people are presented with too many options, they tend to choose none of them. More options create more anxiety about making the wrong choice. More anxiety creates more deferral. The Someday List becomes its own obstacle.

This is one reason why generic inspiration does not work. Telling someone to "follow their dreams" in the presence of fifteen competing dreams is not useful. It is a traffic jam. The question is never whether to go — it is which direction, and how to take the first step without needing to know every step after it.

Fear Wears Very Reasonable Clothes

Alongside the neuroscience and the economics, there is something simpler and more personal: fear. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet, daily kind that dresses itself up as practicality, timing, and good judgment.

I am not sure I would be any good at it. That is fear. The kids are still figuring things out. That is fear. I have waited this long; a little longer won't matter. That is fear with a calendar.

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has shown that perfectionism is linked to chronic procrastination, and perfectionists are significantly more likely to delay taking action on meaningful goals. If you never start, you cannot be judged. If you never try, you cannot fail. The Someday List, in this light, is not just a list of dreams. It is a very comfortable form of self-protection.

None of this means you are not brave. It means you are human. And the good news — genuinely good news — is that the mechanism that creates the delay is also the one we can work with directly.

What Actually Moves People

If fear of failure creates the paralysis, then reducing the stakes dissolves it. This is not a motivational observation. It is a structural one.

The neuroscience of starting shows that the brain's resistance to new behavior is highest just before the action, not during it. The anticipation of the uncomfortable thing is almost always worse than the thing itself. Which means the single most important moment is not a plan, or a commitment, or a conversation — it is a first step small enough that the brain does not have time to build a case against it.

Author James Clear, whose work on identity and behavior change has reached millions of readers, frames it this way: sustainable change does not begin with goals. It begins with identity. The person who says "I am learning to paint" does something categorically different than the person who says "I have always wanted to paint." One is becoming something. The other is deferring something.

The 30-day framework is particularly useful here: one small commitment, for thirty days, does not require certainty about who you will be at the end of it. It just requires showing up once. Then again. The identity shift happens quietly, in the doing.

And if your Someday List feels overwhelming — curation matters more than volume. One good direction, chosen with some care for who you actually are and what you are actually ready for, will move you further than seventeen open tabs.

A Word About Timing

There is a question many people carry underneath the Someday List, one they may not say out loud: Is it too late?

It is worth answering directly. The research is clear, and the evidence from people who have started something new at 60, 65, and beyond is clearer: late starts are not failed starts. They are different starts, and they carry advantages that younger people simply do not have. Patience. Perspective. The particular freedom that comes from knowing what actually matters to you.

The real cost is not starting late. The real cost is playing it safe in a way that feels like prudence but functions like loss. Bronnie Ware's patients did not regret the things they tried. They regretted the things they never gave themselves permission to try.

You still have time. The question is what you want to do with it.

How to Begin

The Someday List does not need to be conquered. It needs one door opened in it.

Not a plan. Not a commitment. Not a conversation you have been putting off. Just one door.

If you already know what is behind it, that is worth something. If you are not sure, that is worth something too — it means the first step is figuring out where you actually want to go, which is a different kind of step but no less real.

- Brian Beane, Founder & CEO of Somniam, Inc.

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