I graduated from university a year ago, and while I have settled into a postgrad job that I am OK with, I have felt a deep sense of guilt and frustration since my late teens at not having an answer to the big question: what do you want to do with your life?
I realise much of this anxiety will come from pressure to be perceived as successful, feel financially secure and other factors, but there remains a deep-seated belief that to be truly happy, I need to find my “thing”. As a pessimistic and anxious person, I find flaws with most career paths in terms of their alignment with the missing “thing” I’m looking for. How do I reconcile the confusion with the inner child who expected more from myself?
Eleanor says: Here are some things I know about searching for your thing: first, it doesn’t need to be in an office, or even a job. In fact, the odds are pretty stacked against finding that the thing that gives us identity and fun will also happen to be one of the ways of making money that our market has come up with. Many things can be your purpose outside what you do for money.
The second is that hunting for it with too-high standards is a good way to miss it, or at least, to fail to cultivate it. It’s a bit like happiness in that respect. Or “true love”. When you understand yourself as a person who doesn’t have it, your standards for what it’ll be like when you finally get it can go higher and higher. The search continues, the vision getting ever grander and more specific, and the view of yourself as someone missing out on it gets all the more load-bearing to your identity. The whole time, opportunities for the thing you’re looking for are whooshing by on all sides, but you don’t grab on to them because they don’t look as perfect as the dream. It’s like wanting a beautiful oak tree so much you pass up all the acorns.
When you first encounter your thing, whatever it is, it won’t necessarily arrive fully developed. It’ll feel exciting – you’ll think “I want to do more of this!” But, like opportunities for love and happiness, it won’t instantly save you, strike you by lightning, whisk you away. You’ll have to commit to it, be patient with it, work on the skills it demands, suffer knockbacks, accept that your relationship with it will ebb and flow. If you chase after a version of “your thing” that will deliver you instantly and effortlessly from the feeling of dissatisfaction with life, you may wait a long time.
The third is – and this might be contrary to things you’ll hear from others – if you do want “your thing” to be a job, you have a relatively short window right now to set yourself up. It’s true it’s never too late. Vera Wang didn’t make her first wedding dress til 40, and all that. But be wary of the drift. Time isn’t infinite. Irons go cold. A few “for now” jobs in a row can punt you into an age and qualification bracket that make it much more difficult to realise an eventual career passion. Not impossible. But more difficult.
So if – if – you want “your thing” to be a job, you have to hustle now. Try things out, don’t wait for them to find you. Stay in touch with the goal even when it’s hard and boring and you’d rather the anesthetic slump of not. Try to make decisions on behalf of your future selves, not just the you you are right now. What will you want life to look like at 30? At 50? When you’re retired? Keeping options open for those future versions of you can be a really motivating way to keep your pedal to the metal.
You have time to find and perfect your thing, whatever it is. But try to stay hungry about finding it, and remember it’ll be something you help make, not something you find fully formed and waiting.
*This question has been edited for length
