The Uncertainty of Not Knowing What to Do With Your Life

At every point in your life there’s always that nagging voice in the back of your mind saying, “What are you doing with your life?” Admittedly, more often than not, that nagging voice is your mother talking to you across from the dinner table.

When you’re in high school, you wonder if you can get the grades needed to get into a top-notch university. You spend your senior year of high school imagining how perfect university is going to be. You visualize your life a year from now, drawing on all the college-themed movies you’ve ever seen, down to your roommate who’s obviously going to be your best friend. Is there any other way?



Then when you’re in university, it’s about trying to figure out what major to pursue. All those movies and TV shows didn’t prepare you for this. How is it that all college students are busy partying on TV, but never worry about their degrees or grades?

Then halfway through your university degree you realize, “hey wait, this isn’t what I want at all!” This realization then launches a series of breakdowns where you try to find out which major really is the one for you. While many people were lucky enough to dodge that bullet and find a major to stick with, just as many of us are unlucky at it.

And then there’s post graduation. You find yourself chucked into the job market where most decent paying jobs require experience. You then attempt to wrap your head around the concept of finding a job when no one will hire you without experience. How exactly are you supposed to get experience that will, in turn, get you a job?

It’s an endless cycle programmed on repeat. You wake up, you’re an adult, and you still don’t know what you want to be when you grow up. The paradox continues in various ways. Some people end up questioning whether they’re ever going to get married, have kids, or whether they even want to.

Even though it may seem like everyone around you has their lives figured out, the reality is that they’re probably just as lost as you. More often than not, everyone struggles to find their path in life, and by making mistakes and running into trouble along the way, they manage to find the way through.

We are constantly exposed to the pressures of deciding what our lives are supposed to be, partly because we live in an unstable region, but partly because this is just part of the modern day human condition. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and so finding a guaranteed life path that will keep us secure is all the more difficult. It’s easy to hate our families for pressuring us, but they simply want to know we’re safe.

If every storyline for a movie or novel requires a conflict for it to be interesting, then shouldn’t that apply to real life as well? Perhaps these storylines are our lives, and the conflicts we encounter only make life more interesting, and by doing so, worth living.