We deserve the life we imagine

Inertia — 213

By Birmingham Museums Trust

Two friends sat across each other at dinner last week, and one of them looked up at the other, suddenly, to admit something they’d been too afraid to say out loud.

“I want a beautiful life.”

The confession hung there between them while they paused. The friend widened her eyes slightly, not in judgment but recognition, as if someone had finally given voice to an issue they were also carrying.

“When did we start apologising for wanting beauty?”

When indeed.

The crux of this issue is that, somewhere along the way, many of us learn to shrink our desires. You start to grow up alongside proclamations around your dreams for abundance, which, on its own, is a beautiful thing. But you soon meet people who embed doubt into your time as an act of derailment. We get told that spiritual growth and material comfort exist in opposition—that to be good means to want less, need less, and be less demanding of life.

But I’ve learned it’s good to be a bit selfish. Because what if our desires—the things that wake you up in the night with their persistence—aren’t distractions from our purpose but essential keystones guiding us towards it?

The permission to want

I spent years trying to convince myself that I should be satisfied with less. But it is a should after all. I wanted to believe that my creative work here should be enough—these words on a page, the quiet satisfaction of making something from nothing. That wanting more, somehow, made me shallow or unenlightened.

Desire doesn’t resolve when denied; it simply goes underground, becoming a shadow that follows us, making us question why our “enough” still never feels quite like enough.

The truth is simple: some of us are built for bigness. Some souls come with blueprints for expansive lives. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make us more virtuous—it makes us incomplete.

You don't need to choose between soulful work and a beautiful life. The idea that you must is perhaps the cruellest lie we've been told and have told ourselves.

The courage to imagine

Your ability to envision it is not random. We ebb and flow, but the big idea is the same: you don’t need to be happy with less. You don’t need to shrink or pretend because it’s more polite or altruistic. The pull towards certain experiences, environments, or ways of being exists for a reason. It’s why people flee countries or bad relationships for a place they deserve. It doesn’t mean their desires are wrong. And to say or believe otherwise is more of a cruel lie.

We have seen countless times across the world that creating a beautiful life means work. It’s hard, unglamorous, and spreads across years. Does having the desire to do that make it wrong? No. It’s refreshing. And when done right, it’s how we can change the world.

It’s not a beautiful thing to diminish your dreams.

Leave this page with this: what would change if you gave yourself complete permission to want what you want? If you stopped qualifying your desires with "but I should be grateful for what I have" or "it's selfish to want more"?

I suspect we’d find that our truest desires aren't frivolous at all; they're pointing us toward a life where we can be most fully ourselves – and therefore most generous, most creative, most alive.

The beauty in the striving

It makes me happy to see people acknowledging what they truly want and then watching the story unfold of them pushing toward it without apology. It creates a different relationship with work, removing thoughts of punishment or obligation, and building a simple bridge between imagination and reality.

The work itself becomes beautiful when it’s aligned with genuine desire. Even the difficult parts carry meaning when you see them as the steps towards what your soul will recognise as home.

It’s not blind consumption or chasing status. The Beautiful Life I’m talking about is creating an internal and external environment where particular magic can flourish, and you are rewarded for making the things people want.

The world needs your bigness

The world doesn’t benefit from you shrinking yourself down. Some individuals may feel better about themselves for it, but that was never your job. The world isn’t served well by your self-denial or modest ambitions.

What the world needs is people living from their centre. A healthy, ambitious centre. People who bring their gifts forward without hesitation. And if part of your gift involves creating beauty, abundance, or spaces for other people to smile and experience wonder, why would you withhold that?

Your desires might very well be integral to your purpose. So paint your world with those healthy colours you love. Fill your spaces with objects that spark joy and make you dance. Create work that reflects your soul. Build relationships that feel like coming home. Travel to places that call you. Learn things that fascinate you.

And do it all without shame. Do it knowing that your hunger for beauty isn't frivolous—it's fundamental to who you are.

We deserve the lives we imagine. Not because we've earned them through suffering or sacrifice, but because the ability to imagine them suggests they're already ours, waiting patiently for us to claim them. You deserve the nice things, the big or little house wherever you want to put it, a nice vacation, or the chance to help your mum and dad retire early.

A beautiful life and a beautiful person are not in conflict, but intertwined. It’s possible to be selfless and well-decorated. And if anythiyou'dou’d only wyou'dou’d realised and acted sooner.