The Placeholder

It’s 2:54 pm on an ordinary Wednesday. You are working on a report or an email, while checking messages in your various chat apps on the phone. Nothing special. It’s 6 minute before the next meeting, hopefully the last meeting of the day, will start. It’s not a bad life but it’s not a spectacularly good life either. You are skeptical if such a “good life” is even possible anyway; but you can’t help stop wondering - "Is this it? What am I doing here now?”

This question keeps showing up, sometimes ambushing you or creeping up in the humdrum of your life. In the past, you were able to go around this question without doing anything about it, but somehow this time you cannot ignore that question anymore and feel the desperate need to do something about it. But you don’t know what to do or where to start. It feels like a big empty space. It scares you a little to enter that space but you feel that there is no other way around this time.

Welcome to the “Placeholder” phase.

What is a placeholder for?

You are surrounded by placeholders in life. It is a symbol, word, or piece of text used to temporarily hold the place of an actual item or data in a document, file, input field, or other areas where content is yet to be provided or finalized.

Placeholders serve various purposes depending on the context. In digital documents such as application forms, placeholders appear inside input fields or text areas as faint text to provide an example of the type of information required (e.g., "Enter your name") or to indicate the data format. This text disappears once the user starts typing in the field. In graphic and web design, placeholders (often grayed boxes or dummy text like "lorem ipsum") are used to mock-up or draft the layout of a page, showing where images, text, or other elements will be placed before the actual content is available. In programming/software development, a placeholder can be a variable, identifier, or parameter that stores a temporary value which will be replaced by the actual data when the program runs. In mathematics formulas, a placeholder can represent a variable or an unspecified value that will be defined later.

The Placeholder Phase

As you can see, we use placeholders to test out new ideas, imagine new possibilities, and ultimately find the right input, which you don’t know yet. The “Placeholder” phase in life serves the same purposes. It’s the phase of our life that we enter to experiment and run new ideas because whatever we’ve been doing no longer works or we don’t feel connected to it anymore. Here are some characteristics of the Placeholder Phase:

• Absolutely uncertain: It’s the period of absolute uncertainty, because we don’t know exactly what we’re doing, we can’t be sure where it will lead us, or how long this period would be.

• Extremely unsettling & chaotic: It could be extremely unsettling and chaotic with so many trials & errors and detours.

• Urgent & Inevitable: Yet it’s the phase we all must go through to find the answer for the question that we couldn’t ignore anymore: “What am I doing here? Is this it?” It feels so necessary to go through the phase, although it’s effing scary.

• Bearing potential for a new path: Despite it is uncertain, unsettling and chaotic, this phase bears huge potential for a new path of a career, relationship, or life.

My Own Placeholder Phases

I’ve gone through the Placeholder phases myself. It happened multiple times in different points of my life. To be frank, it wasn’t obvious to me that I was in the placeholder phase, when I was going through it. Only toward the end of the process or in retrospect, I was able to understand. In these phases, I learned so much about how to live a life meaningfully. I learned so much about myself and learned how to be with difficult moments in life.

After going through the most recent Placeholder phase that ended in 2022, I realized there were some principles to remind myself in order to go through this Placeholder phase successfully next time. I know now that it would have been much easier to go through the Placeholder phase, only if I remembered these principles. Hence, this newsletter came to life. It is born out of a hope to support you as you go through a Placeholder phase.

Are you in the Placeholder Phase now?

Every week, I plan to write about this Placeholder phases - what it looks like (hint: it's different depending on people), what my experience was like, and how other people have gone through or are going through the phase right now. Through this, my hope is to unpack some important principles that will help us go through the Placeholder phase successfully.

Are you in the Placeholder phase now? Or do you feel that you are entering one? Or have you gone through multiple Placeholder phases and have a thing or two you learned that you’d like to share? Or do you want to learn more about how to go through the Placeholder phase successfully so that you can prepare yourself?

I’ll see you next Thursday with a new Placeholder insights!

You can either subscribe to The Placeholder newsletter (https://open.substack.com/pub/miroo/p/the-placeholder) or read it here.