There is a strange pressure to know where your life is going.
We are encouraged to have goals, make plans and know what we want from the future. We are asked where we see ourselves in five years, what our ambitions are and what we are working towards.
There is an assumption that if we are doing life properly, we must Have to Have It All Figured Out.
But what if you don’t?
What if you have absolutely no idea what you will be doing in five years? What if the plan you had a few years ago no longer makes sense? What if you are considering a change but don’t know what you want to change it into?
It can be surprisingly uncomfortable to admit that you don’t know.
We often mistake certainty for confidence. We think confident people must know exactly what they are doing, while uncertainty is something we should overcome as quickly as possible.
So when we don’t have an answer, we start looking for one.
We choose a direction because standing still feels like failure, even when we haven’t worked out whether it is actually the direction we want to go.
But not knowing isn’t necessarily a problem that needs solving.
Sometimes it is simply where you are.
Your life isn’t a five-year plan
There is nothing wrong with having goals. Plans can give us something to work towards and help us make decisions.
The problem starts when we treat the plan as a prediction of how our life is supposed to unfold.
We make a plan based on the person we are today, with the information we have today, and then somehow expect ourselves to follow it even when everything changes.
You might discover something you never knew about yourself. You might meet someone who changes what you want. You might try a job and realise you hate it. You might find something you love that you had never considered before.
Your circumstances might change in ways you could never have predicted.
Changing direction in response to those things isn’t necessarily a sign that you failed to stick to the plan.
It might simply mean you are paying attention.
You are allowed to change your mind
We sometimes talk about changing our minds as though it means we were wrong before.
Maybe you chose a career at twenty-five because it seemed right at the time. Ten years later, you want something completely different.
That doesn’t automatically mean you made a terrible decision.
It means you have had another ten years of experience, and you are now making a decision with information you didn’t have before.
The same applies to relationships, friendships, where we live, what we value and what we want our everyday life to look like.
We change.
Our priorities change. Our circumstances change. Sometimes the things we once wanted genuinely stop being important to us.
There is freedom in recognising that you don’t have to remain loyal to an old version of yourself simply because you once made a decision.
Uncertainty can be useful
Not knowing what comes next can feel frightening, particularly when everyone around you appears to have a plan.
But uncertainty also leaves room.
If you already know exactly what the next five years will look like, there isn’t much space for surprise.
When you don’t know, you can notice things. You can explore. You can try something without having to decide immediately whether it is going to become your new life.
You can take a course because it interests you. Talk to someone doing work you have never considered. Start a project without knowing where it will lead.
You don’t have to turn every experiment into a career.
You don’t have to make every decision permanent.
Sometimes you can simply see where something takes you.
The next step is often enough
Perhaps we put too much pressure on ourselves to know the destination when what we really need is to work out the next step.
If you are unhappy at work, you don’t necessarily need to know what your dream career is before you do anything about it.
You might start by working out what you don’t like, what you need more of, or what kind of environment suits you better.
If you don’t know what you want your life to look like, you don’t have to design the whole thing.
You can start paying attention to what makes you feel more like yourself and what consistently leaves you feeling drained.
Sometimes clarity comes from thinking.
Sometimes it comes from doing.
You try something. You learn from it. You adjust. You try something else.
That is still progress.
There is no prize for figuring it out first
One of the easiest traps is assuming that everyone else has already worked everything out.
They haven’t.
Some people are genuinely certain about what they want. Others are making it up as they go along. Some are happy with where they are. Others are quietly wondering whether they chose the wrong path.
You simply don’t get to see all of that from the outside.
You see the new job announcement, the house purchase, the engagement, the business launch or the photograph from someone’s amazing holiday.
You don’t see the uncertainty that might sit behind it.
And even if someone really does have everything figured out, their life is still their life.
It doesn’t tell you what yours should look like.
Maybe you don’t need a five-year plan.
Maybe you need permission to admit that you are still figuring things out.
There is nothing embarrassing about that. It means you are still paying attention to your life rather than blindly following an old plan because you are afraid to change it.
You can have ambition without having all the answers.
You can want something different without knowing exactly what that something is.
You can change direction without calling the previous direction a mistake.
You don’t need to know where the road ends before you take the next turn.
Sometimes you just need to know that you are willing to keep going, keep learning and change course when you need to.
The rest can unfold as you go.
