There is an abnormal amount of pressure in our society to figure out all aspects of our future.
From the time we enter high school, a clock begins to quickly tick down to the moment that you will need to start having things “figured out”— a dreaded notion that makes a lot of young adults squirm and feel anxious.
This is frequently paired with questions regarding which post-secondary school you should go to, what program to focus on, what job you’ll pursue, where you want to live or what your long-term goals are.
It becomes an endless list of questions typically asked by baby-boomers who have “can I speak to the manager” haircuts.
For the most part, I understand where these concerns can come from.
Often enough family and friends, misguided though they sometimes may be, want to be involved in knowing what plans you have for the future.
But these good intentions often come off as everything but helpful — leading to annoying conversations, banal chit-chat and the half-baked, panicked fabrications of one’s plans for the rest of their adult life.
To put it simply, there is frequently very little regard given to the future when we are young, especially when so many of us are focused on getting through the present.
Throughout high school, I had absolutely no clue what it was that I wanted to do when I graduated.
There is too much of an expectation for life to follow a linear path — and I think that’s incredibly problematic.
Go to school, get a job, buy a car, go to university, get a career, get a house, pay taxes and start a family, settle down.
It doesn’t suit everybody’s individual expectations or perceptions of how they might want their future to play out.
I listened to all the inspirational, after-school-special speakers enthusiastically issuing words of encouragement about how things would “just come to you eventually” and that all you had to do was “wait for the opportunity to come to you.”
But I never had those moments they’d gesture about onstage and wondered if it would ever “click” for me like many so confidently told me it would.
For most of my life, I wanted to be an accountant.
Absolutely no clue why, but at twelve years old it sounded ideal for a kid who liked to work with numbers and fuck around with Rubik’s Cubes when he should have been paying attention.
That was pretty much the closest I ever got to knowing what I wanted to be while growing up and I roll my eyes now at the thought of how boring and clean-cut my aspirations were at such a young age.
But once I got closer to the end of high school and the chorus of repetitive inquiries from family members began drilling their way deeper into my head, the anxiety that I got at the mere thought of planning out my life began to drown out everything else.
Now nearing the end of the third year of my program, I’m finally in a place where I understand the path that I want to take through the rest of adulthood.
It is nowhere near where I thought it would be when I was younger.
I still have a very long way to go until I start feeling like a proper “adult,” but I’m so much further along than I thought I would be at this point.
I feel like a huge part of that was the freedom from needing to decide what I wanted to do immediately.
I started to just allow myself to live my life focusing on the things I enjoyed, as opposed to doing what I thought everyone else expected of me.
There is too much of an expectation for life to follow a linear path — and I think that’s incredibly problematic.
Go to school, get a job, buy a car, go to university, get a career, get a house, pay taxes and start a family, settle down.
It doesn’t suit everybody’s individual expectations or perceptions of how they might want their future to play out.
I will never put down people who have a firm grasp on what they want their lives to be — I’ve always been incredibly envious of those who have gotten to a place where they have it figured out for themselves.
What I want to discourage is the practice of slighting people who haven’t quite “figured it out.”
This criticism doesn’t lead to anything constructive, despite the intentions behind it.
All it does is encourage a cycle of perpetual anxiety that sticks in the heads of those who haven’t yet found the answers.
When you get right down to it, you’ll find those answers when you’re ready and willing to. There is no immediate rush, other then pestering parents who were anticipating an empty nest sooner rather than later.
You don’t have to live life according to anybody else’s timeline but your own.