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?
I think something has gotten messed up in our culture that makes people obsess in an unhealthy way about identity. It’s a natural concern for people in their twenties, but it gets exaggerated. Your identity is just who you really are and it is a life’s work to get to know that and to develop it, and the possibilities are much broader than you can know, especially when you are awash in a culture that is selling you identities. Don’t put yourself in a box or fit yourself into some mold by deciding on some ‘identity’. Give yourself room and let it naturally develop.
Get yourself a good therapist. It is their job to help you answer these kinds of questions yourself.
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.
“Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as they say. The future is important, but so is the now.
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.
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.
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 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!
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
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.
Wow, why is it so hard for you to say what the problem is? It’s going to be a bit hard to get any advice.
I assume you wanted children but are sterile? You can still adopt. Even if that’s not what you mean, there are always alternatives in some way that let you achieve what you want, maybe not exactly like you imagined it, but a similar thing.
Everyone else already has said the “general” stuff that can be said without getting any more information from you. If you really want help, you should be ready to share some more information and answer questions people have, as well as answer people’s comments with sharing your true thoughts, not holding back like you did in your main post.
In the end, how do you get over this? You understand rationally that you can never plan the future 100%. You understand that once people achieve a goal/plan, they don’t become happy, they just try to achieve a new goal/plan. To become happy, you have to be happy with what you currently have, no matter what that is.
You don’t have to have an identity to live. Identity is irrelevant. It’s a thought-up human concept that in the grand scheme of things has no meaning. What does it matter what your identity was 100 years from now? 1000 years from now? A million years from now?
And once you rationally understand these things, you have to convince your subconscious of them as well, which is much harder and requires lots of practice.
It could be a career, or religion. For me I was planning to become a pastor, but then became an atheist. It really did throw me off. In my case I think I’m much happier than I would have been, but do kick myself because I could have been positioned much better if I wasn’t making plans in this other direction.
Yes, it was a career with moving back to my home country (which I had to leave when I was a child) attached to it.
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.
