Can everyone please stop asking 'what's next'?

Let's revel in the 'now'

The Valley stage at Wilderness festival, where last weekend I was “in the moment,” dancing to DJs like Barry Can’t Swim

This is a week late as I forgot to let you know that I was away last weekend at Wilderness, a festival in the English countryside where you can do everything from streak at a cricket match to join a disco ceilidh to drink orange wine at a banquet and rave in a forest at 3am. It was great fun, but somewhat knackering and I needed some time to recover.

Catching up on the Olympic Games after the festival, I was struck by comments made by American gymnast Simone Biles.

She said on Twitter (X): “You guys really gotta stop asking athletes what’s next after they win a medal at the Olympics.” Biles has won more medals than any other gymnast at an Olympic Games or World Championship event.

“Let us soak up the moment we’ve worked our whole lives for,” she added.

I have sympathy for these comments, because the “what’s next?” question is so familiar. It’s aimed at everyone, everywhere, and I am guilty of it too.

The media (yes, that’s me) is obsessed with what’s next.

“How can we move the story on?” is the question editors ask when another outlet breaks some news and the editor wants to put their publication’s own slant on it. Cue ringing up contacts who might be able to “give you a line” on what said event might mean if this or that happens next.

Part of the reason we ask “what’s next?” is because we know that asking “what does winning feel like?” of someone who has just won her fourth medal is going to elicit superlatives like “amazing,” “unbelievable” or “incredible”. And, of course, these are all true.

But people want to know what’s next because it might prompt a more interesting response, or provide a new nugget of information.

This is not to take away from Biles’ incredible achievements, but what’s more interesting than success is the struggle, the striving, the ups and downs, the person behind the sparkles and shine.

This is partly why the Netflix film ‘Simone Biles Rising’ is doing so well, as it documents how hard things became for her at the Tokyo Games in 2021.

Asked “what’s next?” of Biles, the question is probably a euphemism for “will you retire?” (at 27, Biles is considered to be old in gymnastic terms), or “do you plan to have a family?” (she got married last year).

But she knows that if she answers the question honestly, for example by announcing her retirement, that will be what makes headlines and overshadows her wins.

But while I get why journalists ask “what’s next?” doing so also reflects the skewed vision we have of life.

We are all obsessed with what’s happening tomorrow, or next week or next year. We’re already on to the new thing and barely allow ourselves to bask in the glory of our current achievements, or to relish what is happening at this precise moment.

I had my first (and who knows, my only) piece published in National Geographic a couple of weeks ago - read it here. It’s about antique maps and what cartographers from hundreds of years ago got ‘right’ about the world as we know it today, and was quite hard to write as it’s not a subject I knew much about before.

Getting published in National Geographic is A Big Deal for me. Not quite winning Olympic gold (that would be getting published in The New York Times), but y’know, it’s up there on the podium.

But how long did I celebrate for? About 20 seconds. I got the notification that the piece was live as I checked my phone walking up a hill after a Pilates class. Then I posted about it on LinkedIn, it got 26 likes, and I moved on to the next thing.

As a freelance journalist, I sometimes feel like I’m only as good as the last thing I published, and I have to keep pushing on to achieve, survive and make progress.

So as humans in general, are we only as good as the most recent ‘thing’ we ‘did’?

Whether that be making a delicious dinner for a date, getting a bonus at work or pushing a baby out? If we’re so obsessed with what’s next then the most recent thing we did has a sell-by date and I sometimes feel we’re not allowed to revel in it.

Dating someone in my twenties, a friend asked whether I was taking the “next step” and moving in with him. At a wedding with a boyfriend in my thirties, another guest asked whether we planned to get married.

These questions are annoying for two reasons – because they don’t allow you to revel in the moment, and because they are deeply personal when it’s no-one else’s business.

Friends who are married are asked when they’re going to have children, or if they have one kid they’re asked when they’re having another.

The irony is that ‘now’ is kind of all we have. Sure, we can save for a rainy day, and have big goals and visions to work towards, but we really have no idea of what might happen to us tomorrow. So, please, let’s take note of Biles’ plea and stop asking “what’s next?” Maybe, just maybe we can be happy in what’s ‘now’.