Our son is playing a LOT of baseball. And he’s playing incredibly well. It has been a fun season, watching him improve, forge bonds with his teammates, and emerge as a little leader in the dug out and on the field. I’m so proud my heart could burst.

And watching him succeed has made me think quite a bit about how we start to live vicariously through our children.

Of course it’s unintentional. And I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing, either! Being invested in our children’s success is kind of evolutionarily important, if nothing else.

I just wonder if there isn’t some element of hiding that is also happening when we are so invested in our children, perhaps at the expense of any investment in our own. At what point do we shift from wanting to experience life for ourselves vs. living life through our kids?

We have some awesome friends who have kids who are in highschool. We don’t see them often, so every time we get a chance to hang out it feels like ‘why do these kids all of a sudden seem like grownups?’ The last time we hung out, they were talking about the realization that in a few short years they were really going to miss having their kids around – they’ll both be in college – and how they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.

‘It’s kind of sad, really,’ said the Dad offhandedly. ‘That we don’t have a lot of ideas left.’

So my early morning contemplations today are about living vicariously… through myself. I mean, if I’m going to do it anyway (that is a tendency we can sometimes have) why not live vicariously through my future self, Millionerica, and maybe just start to show up as more of her every day?

I felt it was important to Google what it meant to live vicariously through someone else and this is what came up.

To “live vicariously through someone” means to experience life’s pleasures or challenges indirectly, through the lens of another person’s actions, experiences, or achievements, rather than experiencing them firsthand. It’s like enjoying a friend’s vacation by watching their photos or feeling proud of a child’s success as if it were your own. 

It goes on to state that the three main reasons we do this is to disassociate from reality, to gain validation, or to enjoy a different perspective.

Okay I change my original statement: I want to experience my own life, firsthand. I want to be ASSOCIATED with my reality because it is a beautiful one in so many ways. I want to not need validation from outside sources and I definitely want to enjoy the perspective of Future Me, who knows how I’m going to achieve all of this and more.

Is there a way that you’re living vicariously through someone else? What do you think is YOUR main reason for doing this? And if you notice that you’re disassociated from the reality of your existence, what is one action you could take today to live it more fully and experience your own life… the successes, misadventures, and milestones… firsthand?