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I found in this blog post the following definition :

Psychologists have a concept they call “provisional living.” That’s the insistence, so often heard from people whose lives are stuck on a dysfunctional merry-go-round of self-inflicted crisis, that everything they don’t like about their lives will change just as soon as something else happens: as soon as they lose twenty pounds, get a divorce, quit their lousy job, or what have you. Of course the weight never goes away, the divorce papers never get filed, and so on, because the point of the exercise is to allow daydreams of an imaginary life in which they get everything they think they want take the place of the hard work and hard choices inseparable from personal change in the real world.

Searching on the web or in Google Books I didn't find a definition of provisional living.

I found on a blog a similar definition as the above in this blog post:

Psychologists sometimes call this ‘provisional living’, whereby you tell yourself that you’ll truly come alive, truly be fulfilled and optimally creative when you’ve moved, married, divorced, retired or whatever. So much of our culture is based on it, it’s hard to resist. When the mortgage is paid then you’ll really be free, when you move to the country, when you no longer have to earn a living, when, when, when…and then of course you die.

I found a reference of provisional living linking it with the passage ritual also in the book Close Relationships : Family, Friendship, Marriage Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts by Bertine, Eleanor:

To overcome the father and the mother is to take up the responsibilities of adulthood, to sacrifice provisional living. Then life will surely become harder and more problematic, but potentially more meaningful. It is a momentous step, so much so that primitive peoples, who are close to the unconscious and its eternal laws, celebrate the transition by the always serious and sometimes rather grim rites of initiation.

I was not able to find a definition in a psychology dictionary or anywhere.

What is the source of this concept? Is it used in psychology and is there a equivalent term that is more used?