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TL;DR

Years ago I met a young computer scientist from my own small Caribbean country. He was brilliant and arrogant and kept me at arm's length, and one day I asked him an ordinary, ambitious question — what's your five-year goal? He died in a car accident before those five years were up, and I never got his answer. This is an essay about what that loss taught me: that the future is not a contract, that we treat time as something we own when it is only ever borrowed, and that letting people in — and asking how they are today — matters more than any plan.

A Stranger Who Felt Like Home

We were both far from where we started. That was the first thing I noticed about him.

I met him at the kind of event where people exchange business cards and rehearsed answers, and at first he was just another sharp young engineer in a room full of them. Then he said the name of his country — my country, a small place in the Caribbean that almost no one I work with has heard of, the kind of place you have to spell twice and then point to on a map. Something in me leaned forward. When you build a life on the other side of an ocean from where you were a child, the sound of home in a stranger's mouth does something to you. It is gravity. It is recognition. It felt, for a moment, like finding family in a crowd.

He did not feel the gravity back.

He was young — younger than me — and he carried his intelligence the way the young often do, like a thing that entitled him to certainty. He had opinions about everything and patience for very little. When I tried to find the warm, easy camaraderie that two people from the same tiny island ought to share, he met it with a shrug.

"I don't really do friends," he told me once, not unkindly, just as a fact about himself he'd decided long ago. "I'm focused right now."

I should have let it go. Plenty of people would have. But I am stubborn in a particular way — I keep knocking on doors that aren't opening, partly out of optimism and partly out of sheer mulishness — and I think I saw something underneath the arrogance that I wanted to reach. Maybe it was just that he reminded me of home. Maybe it was that I recognized, in his armor, a younger version of an ambition I understood from the inside. So I kept talking to him. I asked about his projects. I sent the occasional message. I treated him like a friend even though he had clearly declined the role, and I told myself that one day he'd come around, the way I always assume people will, given enough time.

That phrase. Given enough time. I used to say it like time was a faucet I could leave running.

The Question

I don't remember the exact day. It was an unremarkable conversation, the kind you have a hundred times in a career without ever expecting one of them to lodge in you like a splinter for the rest of your life.

We were talking about work, about where things were headed, and I asked him the question we are all trained to ask each other. The polite one. The ambitious one. The one that fits neatly into a networking conversation and signals that you take a person's future seriously.

"So — what's your five-year goal?"

It is a good question. I want to be clear about that, because for a long time I told myself it wasn't. It is the question every mentor asks, every interviewer asks, every well-meaning person at a dinner asks when they want to show interest in your life. It assumes the best about a person: that they have a future worth planning, that they are the kind of person who builds toward something, that five years from now there will be a them to have arrived somewhere.

He answered. I know he answered, because I remember the rhythm of the conversation continuing, the way you remember the shape of a room without remembering what was on the walls.

But I cannot, for the life of me, recall what he said.

I have tried. I have sat very still and gone back to that moment and reached for it, and there is nothing there — a blank where his ambition used to be. Whatever five-year goal he named, it was swallowed whole by what came after, the way a single bright detail gets erased by a flash of light. I asked a young man where he was going, and the universe, with appalling timing, made sure I would never know.

Five Years He Never Got

He did not get five years.

In less time than that — far less — he got into a car, and the car left the road, and the road had a tree at the end of it. It was sudden and it was violent and it was the kind of death that does not let you tell yourself a comforting story about peace or readiness. One day he was a brilliant, infuriating, full-of-future young man with opinions about everything, and the next he simply was not anywhere at all.

I learned about it secondhand, the way you so often learn these things — a message, a stunned pause, a name you'd typed a dozen times now sitting in a sentence with the wrong verb tense. He was. I read it three times before it arranged itself into meaning.

What surprised me was how much it hurt. We were not close. By any honest accounting he was barely an acquaintance — a man who had told me plainly he didn't want my friendship, whom I'd pursued mostly out of homesickness and habit. I had no right to the grief I felt. And yet for weeks I carried him around like a stone in my chest. I'd be in a meeting and think of him. I'd hear our country mentioned on the news and think of him. I'd open my laptop to write something ambitious about my own five-year plans and feel the words curdle.

I replayed our conversations and I winced — at his certainty, at my persistence, at how ordinary all of it had been. I winced especially at that question, the five-year question, which had curled into something cruel in hindsight. For a while I treated it as the worst thing I'd ever said to anyone, as though by asking about a future he wouldn't have I had somehow tempted it away from him.

That, I have come to understand, is grief doing what grief does: looking for a hand to put on the wheel, because a senseless death is unbearable and a death we can blame ourselves for at least has a shape. The truth is plainer and harder. The question didn't hurt him. The question was kindness. A car and a tree and a few terrible seconds took him, and I had nothing to do with any of it. What haunted me was never my words. It was the gap between the future I'd politely asked him to imagine and the one he actually got.

What We Get Wrong About Time

We live as though the future is a contract we've already signed.

Our whole working culture is built on it. We set five-year goals and ten-year visions and quarterly objectives. We defer rest until after the launch, postpone the trip until the promotion, save the real living for some later, more deserving version of ourselves who will finally have earned it. We speak about time the way we speak about money in a healthy bank account — a resource we can budget, draw down deliberately, count on being there next month.

It is a useful fiction. You cannot build a company, raise a child, or write a book without some belief that tomorrow will arrive and find you in it. Planning is an act of faith in the future, and I would not want to live without it.

But it is a fiction, and his death made the fiction visible to me in a way I cannot un-see. A five-year goal assumes five years. Every plan I have ever made has quietly assumed I'd be here to see it through, and that assumption is not a fact. It is a bet. A reasonable bet, most days — but a bet, on borrowed time, with no guarantee attached and no refund if the loan is called early.

The people who seem to understand this best are often the ones who have stood close to its edge — survivors of illness, of accidents, of loss. They will tell you, almost universally, that the brush with the end did not make them more ambitious. It made them more present. They stopped saving their lives for later. They called the people they loved. They took the vacation. They said the thing.

I didn't need to nearly die to learn this. I only needed to ask a stranger about his future and then watch the future renege on the deal.

Letting People In

There's a second lesson tucked inside the first, and it's the one I think about most now.

He didn't want my friendship, and I'll never know why. Maybe he really was just focused. Maybe the armor was protecting something. Maybe he assumed, the way the young so reasonably do, that there would be time later — time to soften, to circle back, to let people in once the urgent striving had settled down. We tell ourselves that relationships can wait because the work can't. We are wrong about which one is scarce.

I used to find his refusal a little insulting. Now I find it unbearably sad, because "later" was a country he never got to visit. Whatever connection might have grown between two people from the same small island, thrown together improbably half a world from home, never got the chance, and a piece of that is simply that he didn't think he needed to hurry. Neither did I.

So I've changed the questions I ask. I still care about where people are going — ambition is not the enemy here. But I've learned to ask the smaller questions too. Not just what's your five-year goal, but how are you, actually, today. Not just what are you building, but what's hard right now. Those questions assume nothing about the future. They meet a person where they are, which is the only place any of us are ever guaranteed to be.

And when someone lets me in — even reluctantly, even on the third or fourth try, even with their armor still half on — I try to treat it as the genuinely rare thing it is. A person's openness is not infinite and it is not owed and it does not wait politely for you to get less busy. It is a window, and windows close.

You Never Know Where Life Will Take You

I think about him more than makes sense for someone I barely knew. I think about him when I catch myself deferring something that matters because the work is loud and the work is now. I think about him when a younger, sharper colleague keeps me at arm's length and I feel the old urge to take it personally — and I remember, instead, to simply keep the door open and expect nothing.

I still can't remember his five-year goal. I've made my peace with that. The lesson was never in his answer. It was in the question, and in the gap that opened underneath it, and in everything that taught me about the quiet arrogance of assuming tomorrow.

You never know where life will take you. You never know how much time anyone has — the colleague who won't let you in, the stranger who sounds like home, the person you're certain you'll have years to understand. So ask the small questions. Take the trip. Let people in. Say the thing now, while there is a now to say it in.

Rest easy, my friend. I never got your answer. But I have never once forgotten you.

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