For most of my teens I (21) had a broad but distinct vision for what I wanted my 20s to look like. It was everything I liked, I was looking forward to it, and was planning around it. Unfortunately it now seems that a central tenet of that vision will not be possible and I’m gonna have to rethink my 20s to suddenly look radically different (not sure how yet) to what I had come to anticipate. What’s more, some of the things outside of my influence that I was sorta expecting to have happened by now (first kiss etc) haven’t and I’ve found myself waiting around for them before I feel prepared to move on (they were part of the vision).
Unfortunately, since I had come to identify myself with and live in expectation of this path for my 20s, even when the central thing became impossible I tried to salvage the rest and make the side things still happen – which, as I have found, takes much more effort without that central thing tying them together. Since I’ve been planning around it for so long, I’ve sort of forgotten what alternatives there are so I don’t even know what else could be right for me (or how to find that out).
I think what makes it so hard to abandon the future I was expecting is that it gave me a sense of identity. This might also be because I didn’t like the life my parents had arranged for me during my teens. I’m afraid that if I try to go with the flow, embrace my actual (unhappy) reality and don’t try to correct my course to at least partially replicate the future that was supposed to happen, I would eventually become a different person, which discomforts me. It’s also the reason I’m afraid to try new things that could distract me from the (albeit now impossible) trajectory that I have come to identify with.
I guess this really leads me to ask what the bigger mistake that I’m making is. Why do I constantly need this future path/plan of experiences to guide me and give my life a feeling of meaning? How do I learn to let go and embrace whatever I’m served by life and live in the present without caring about where the path leads? I liked the feeling of certainty that having a (retrospective, almost?) vision of the future gave me but it made me a control freak.
TL;DR: I blindly made my life decisions based on a future path that is now long obsolete, but gave me a sense of identity and my life/struggle meaning. How can I let go of it so that I can embrace my actual situation and retain my identity whilst on a path that may end up looking completely different and unfamiliar?
This happened to me. I got a PhD and expected to be able to get a tenure track job in academia. Sure, it’s hard. But it wouldn’t be me that failed at it, right? Wrong. Three years later, no job, scraping by on adjunct work.
I went back to law school. Sometimes you have to redefine your life in a way that gives you new opportunities. Does it still hurt that I couldn’t get my dream job? Yeah, but I have a lot of good I can do for the world in other ways, and I’m not going to let that dream’s death prevent me from doing it.
Yeah, hearing about how hard it would be to get tenure dissuaded me from pursuing my original dream of doing a PhD. In retrospect I think I am much happier where I am now than I would’ve been, which really is what matter the most to me now. Freeing myself of the obligation of attaining my goals was actually quite nice.
Get yourself a good therapist. It is their job to help you answer these kinds of questions yourself.
Plans are useless, just do whatever you feel at the moment. The important thing is to never regret and to always move on
Something about your plans was very appealing to you. What about them gave you a sense of identity? Why those plans specifically? Try to figure that out: be very specific, write it down even, and discuss it with people. Once you figure out the driving force behind your plans, use that to guide you.
Hmm, good idea. In my case it was a career that would allow me to move back to my home country (which I had to leave when I was a child). I’ll have a think about alternative ways to reinforce the identity that this path gave me.
Was your whole plan about having a family in your 20s? If not, then I don’t see how the lack of a significant other matters. What career plans do you have? What interests do you have? Also, keep in mind that validation should come from within, you shouldn’t let anyone (or their absence) define how you feel about yourself.
Get into therapy, if possible. I’ve learned so much from therapy (and quality therapists (I’m old)), including building a healthier sense of self that was underdeveloped due to home life stuff when I was a kid. At 38, I was finally able to love myself, something I had thought impossible. A 21yo version of me wouldn’t have been able to envision the me of today because it would seem impossible.
Maybe you only do therapy to help adjust to this one thing that you’re asking about and then you’re good. It sounds like you may not have the amount of baggage that I had. But I think it’s an incredibly valuable and useful tool. The catch is having the right therapist. Be prepared to say that it isn’t a good fit if you don’t trust the person. I find that for each good therapist (three over ~30 years), I’ve had to meet with at least one, once two, who were a bad fit.
Good luck!
Plans never go the way you expect them too. Also, this is the most vague post I’ve ever seen in my life. You said a lot of words without really saying much.
It is incredibly odd…isn’t it? So many words saying very little.
To OP, I think it would help others to give you advice if you say exactly what sort of plans you had that didn’t work out. Plans not working out come in all shapes and sizes, and advice for one thing doesn’t necessarily apply to another.
If it’s a relationship you seem to desire, then asking for more relationship focused advice may be more fruitful than vaguebooking and not getting much in the way of useful responses.
Hmm, I suppose it is quite vague. I just thought the problem was quite generic (and so would be its solutions) and thought the specifics would be a distraction.
You want to make god laugh? Show him your plans.
There’s a reason we have dozens, probably hundreds of sayings about this.
Welcome to life, OP.
Plan as much as you want. Its nornal to feel uneasy about the unreliability of your plan. Dealing with uncertainty is difficult and many dont deal with it and spend life avoiding that feeling. Giving up on your plans is an option if you want.
Aim for your happy place of a neat and reliable plan. Handle failures to maintain your plan with grace and forgive yourself. Or get angry and double down on your efforts. Its all you friend. This is a life experience thing that comes to everyone who tries.
“Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as they say. The future is important, but so is the now.
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”
- John Lennon, Beautiful Boy
And unbeknownst to me until I went to check to see if I was right about the origination (I wasn’t), “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans”
- Allen Saunders, Readers Digest, January 1957
I can relate to this. I’m in my 40s now with quite a bit of hindsight.
When I was in my 20s I went to school in a creative field but with a science degree. I ended up getting through the program and earning my BS. However, I ultimately found that the field I was going into treated people poorly so I decided not to go forward with a career in it. Instead, I kept working in retail, where I had to get through school, and eventually worked my way up into management.
I now run a branch in a completely different field and am doing very well, have learned a ton, and have helped many people. It’s fulfilling and been good to me and my family. When I was deciding where life would take me, this wasn’t planned, but it’s probably 100x better than where I would be if I had chosen to go forward with my original plan.
Life is pretty wild.
You can literally do anythingLike, you can straight up choose the wrong career, or become a hardcore alcoholic by the time you’re 30, and no one can really stop you.
It’s pretty scary, but also pretty liberating to think about.It’s very easy to ruin your life while it’s much harder to get it straight. I think the whole “you can be anything you want to be” mentality is very idealistic and a product of survivorship bias. It shouldn’t stop you from trying by any means, just something to keep in mind.
Good insight
Also the first one and the third one make the second one so much easier.
The only, really only, case in which you should plan that much into the future is when you’re a gov / politician / business. Plans for the average person never work out
Even for the gov and business they usually don’t work out, but they realize that “plans are useless, but planning is essential.”
Now that is a good quote
Some people learn about the limits of their control over events by meditating. Even when you stop trying to do anything, your body tries to do things and things change around you and you have the impulse to control things. Repeated exposure to this impulse eventually caused me to start laughing at how silly I was to assume that I was in control.
Maybe something like that could help you. Peace.
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Shift your goal to something more realistic based on your new knowledge of the world. This will happen multiple times throughout life; it’s part of the process.
Jordan Peterson covers this extensively in his course Maps of Meaning. You can watch or listen to the course on youtube by searching
maps of meaning 2017 full courseI know he’s controversial, but mostly based on lies people tell about him. Sometimes to be happy you gotta see past the bullshit and go check something out for yourself.
Hmm ok, I’ll have a look at it
Counterpoint: he’s controversial because of what he says and does, not because of lies people tell about him.
I misinterpreted your comment and was very pleasantly surprised that something named “rational wiki” would call him out for the crackpot that he is.
