This week, my academic adviser said he was proud of me. You may be thinking that perhaps I won an award, maintained a 4.0 GPA or got an internship — something impressive to garner this praise. Ironically, all I did was tell him I didn’t know what I was doing with my life.
The last time we met up, I had unraveled a whole crisis to him about my fears that I’d never get a job and my intimidation that everyone was doing so much better than me. I wasn’t even fully certain what I wanted to do, but it felt like my peers had their 10-year plans down to a T. We actually had to have two whole appointments because I spent the first one rambling about my panic.
So, when we reunited a couple months later, he was ecstatic that I seemed to be in a much better place. I don’t know if I actually was in a better place, I was at least in a more nihilistic, devil-may-care place. But he told me he couldn’t even imagine the girl he had last met with saying something like “I guess I’ll figure it out eventually.”
We live in a culture obsessed with knowing how things are going to go, bragging about our plans, building our schedules, visiting psychics and checking the weather forecast. Granted, I may be a slightly more extreme case than most other people, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are very future-facing, and to know what’s going to happen is like a special superpower. But my conversation with my adviser got me thinking — is it actually better not to know?
This is a rather dizzying concept for me to wrap my head around as someone with lifelong control issues. I’m the type of girl who constantly fears she’s coming down with the flu, obsessively checks the weather the day an event is being held and drives herself insane over the great jobless expanse of her future. Obviously, I don’t want to be like this, but the idea of giving up that compulsive desire for control always felt like advice for my own sake so that I don’t rip all my hair out before I can legally drink. Could it also just be how we should all be living, all the time?
It’s impossible to deny that there are some, at least perceived, pros to having everything planned out — security, preparedness, even credibility. It must be nice to know that post-graduation, you’ll sink into some cushy business advising job and immediately make double the salary I could even dream of starting with. Plus, having these goals in mind makes it much easier to achieve them, revealing the nicely ordered steps towards where you want to be. Even with bigger, more abstract problems, knowing what’s coming feels like a salve to any insecurity. Imagine knowing when your relationship will end, or start, or knowing when you’re coming down with a virus or knowing when something dangerous is going to happen so you can avoid it. Our survival instincts relish the concept of unobscured foresight.
However, there’s a flip side to all this. We can’t actually know. So everything I’ve just said has been invalidated in one fell swoop, beyond the social credit of seeming like you know. But at the end of the day, that’s all it is. Seeming like you know. None of us can predict if war will suddenly break out, or a loved one will pass away or we’ll get hit by a bus. We also can’t predict if we’ll fall in love with someone and move across the country for them, or we’ll get offered a position at a job we never anticipated or we’ll suddenly come into money through some secret inheritance.
In this light, knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t seem like much of a superpower. Instead, it seems like a waste of time and obsessive energy trying to map out a course that cannot truly be charted. And just imagine, the fall will be so much greater if you spent years predicting a future that doesn’t come than if you surrendered to the randomness of our destinies.
Everyone is obsessed with proving you know how your life will go and uplifting people with these hyper-specific goals and dreams. There is shame in admitting you’re not totally sure. Every time someone asks me what I’m going to do when I graduate, I feel this shame bubble up inside of me. It’s embarrassing — a failure that I don’t already have a 401k lined up. In the same breath, I’m guilty of feeling brief superiority when someone else seems even more lost than I am, reassured by having at least a semblance of trajectory. I’m just as much a part of the problem.
But what if we tried to reframe how we view our futures? Imagine instead being proud of people who don’t quite have it all figured out yet. They must have so many opportunities ahead, so many choices, not boxed in by the confines of their decided future that isn’t even guaranteed. Instead, they are free to follow their heart and their joy, to trust in themselves and to live life in the way we were meant to live it, as a constant journey of discovery and growth. I know very few people whose lives went perfectly as expected. In fact, most people aren’t doing exactly what they majored in, and they certainly didn’t have dream jobs right out of college.
We cannot predict if we will fall ill, or we’ll get our dream jobs, or if we’re all headed towards fiery doom or if we’ll marry our soulmates. We can, however, drive ourselves crazy trying. There’s a famous quote — “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” — and no, it was not originated by John Lennon. This phrase has always stuck with me as a girl who spends most of her life making plans and predictions and obsessively checking that everything’s okay. One of my greatest fears for myself is that I’ll be 99 in some hospital bed, look back and realize that I missed it. I missed my whole life. Let all the excitement and connection fly past me as I devoted my energy to knowing what was coming next.
As terrifying as it is for me to admit, my adviser was right to prescribe me a mild dose of ignorance. Not so much that it would prevent me from getting anything done, but enough so that I don’t crash out every time I can’t predict the future — which would be constantly.
At the end of the day, I would much rather live a life of surprises and twists than be so obsessive over my future I forget to live at all.
