I have been dwelling on what it means to live well. Not because I have mastered it, but because I have become very comically bad at it. I have spent years rushing through my life, panicked and convinced I was running out of time. I worried constantly about work – getting it, keeping it, doing it, caring about it too much, hating it and losing it. I obsessed over being more productive. I fretted about money, mostly about not having any left after travelling too much. I poured so much energy into dating that it’s kind of impressive I haven’t had a relationship for the last six years.

But most of all I became fixated on my fertility and how it dwindled in my early 30s, leaving me to make choices most women don’t have to until later. I tried to save my eggs and couldn’t. My lack of a partner in a conservative Catholic Lebanese family became a cudgel.

Pleasure was something bypassed on the way to a goal of being chosen and accepted. In other words, joy was a byproduct.

Trying to live well in a society that doesn’t prioritise it is like filling a cup with the bottom cut off: the water just runs through, passing you by, leaving you as parched as sandpaper.

A holiday was an opportunity to recover from work. In Italy, the plastic cup in my hand was solid and filled with the bitter strength of a negroni sbagliato – or a “broken negroni” – a drink whose name comes from the fact it was first made by mistake.

I asked the bartender why there was an exuberant street party forming outside. What was the occasion, in other words?

“Just because,” he said. “We don’t need a reason.”

Why did I need a reason to enjoy myself? The question ran through me.

I thought about all the ways I had been trained to postpone my life. Why did I need a reason to celebrate the very act of being alive? At that moment I pondered the many nights spent couch-bound, parked in front of a television – not in a fun and delicious single-gal-about-town-living-her-best-life way, but in a dark abyss void of nothingness. Not even eating ice-cream straight from the tub, because that would be too indulgent. I couldn’t even enjoy spending money on trinkets and flowers and dresses that brought me joy without fretting and feeling guilty for spending money during an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, thereby negating the original dopamine hit.

We are told there is one way to live a life: just work harder, achieve more, be thinner, be younger, find a partner, get married, have a baby, save money, buy a house, build a career, have it all! Then, presumably, I will have made it! Made it to the part where I was allowed to relax. But when? And what if the forced veering off the path was necessary and part of my story, to show me that there are other ways to live? When the tough times tear through like a tornado, what is there left for us to do if those things don’t work out?

Since that moment in Italy, I have thought deeply about how to instead live a life that makes you feel fully alive, something I have dubbed “the juicy life”. There are so many simple and uncomplicated ways to live like this. Big belly laughs, truly tasting a salted tomato in summer, baptismal swims in the sea, sitting at a long table until golden hours bleed into night. Let boredom engulf you. Wander and meander and do something for no reason at all. Bring back whimsy! Pay attention to the details, to what lights you up. What makes you feel more like yourself?

Create from nothing, make things that didn’t exist before: art, meals, gardens, traditions, friendships, books, beauty, music, films, photos and spaces. To create anything at all is defiance – to give life in a world that tells us only some creation stories matter. Take long walks, but go lightly, with ease and notice everything around you. Hold someone’s hand in yours and gaze at the moon. Scrunch basil up to your face with both hands and breathe it in. It’s much harder to feel existential despair when you embody your life entirely.

There will always be more of everything, an endless panopticon of slop, of tech platforms churning and burning through content, of machines trying to quench their thirst on what makes us human. But you are not a walking replicant robot. Humans need rest and balance. And everything, all of this, is fleeting and not forever.

The Greeks have two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is chronological time – tracking the seconds, the hours and the schedules, all adding up with nowhere to go but forward and rushed. But kairos time is different, because it is time measured by meaning – the opportune and transcendent moment; what sits between.

The ancient Pythagoreans called kairos one of the fundamental laws of the universe, the force that wove together the dualities of existence. When you live on kairos time, you move through the world differently: you stop checking and fretting over the literal and metaphorical clock. You listen instead to the revelation, to the rhythm beneath your feet. You dip down to the earth, feel the ground, hold the pebbles and rocks, let your limbs surrender.

That’s when life shuttles beyond a checklist of things to achieve or acquire and becomes a constellation of moments, meaning made and remade, steeped in pleasure, to be savoured, saturating the moment until it becomes meaning itself. That’s where life lives. Make no sbagliato mistake.

• Sheree Joseph is a writer, editor and the author of Juicy: How to Live a Life in the Wreckage of Expectations