Why You Don't Know What to do With Your Life

On Finding Something to Dedicate Your Life to

“I have no idea what I wish to pursue or dedicate my life to.” - a message I received the other day.

“I don’t know what to do with my life. I don’t have that "one thing" to give myself fully to. What should I do? Why didn’t I find that one thing yet? How do I find it?”

This is one of the most common types of messages I receive on my Instagram page.

I am going to try to unpack all of my thoughts on this question, which I believe can be of some value.

I will try to address three aspects of this question: what I believe are the two main reasons you don’t know what to pursue, "the age problem," and the biggest misconception around having a purpose.

In the rest of this text, I will mostly use the terms "purpose" and "passion." What I mean by these terms is the same thing that you might mean by the terms mission, calling, or vocation. It is that "one thing" that you want to dedicate your life to.

Two Main Reasons Why You Don’t Have a Purpose

When I hear that someone doesn’t know what to do with their life or what they should dedicate it to, I have a really strong opinion that it’s one of two things:

Either you haven’t lived enough or you never gave anything a real chance.

From this answer, hopefully you will immediately realize that I don’t believe in the idea of your purpose falling into your lap. If you want to read more on this specific idea, you can read "How To Develop Passion (Not Find or Discover It)."

Some of the explanations and examples that I give might feel uncomfortable if you relate to them. But none of it is meant as a criticism of the way you are living your life. I can understand and relate to everything that I am about to mention. In fact, it is precisely because I can relate and because I made those mistakes that I’m comfortable talking about them.

You haven’t lived enough.

Although I often get messages from young people who are at the age when almost no one knows what to do with their life, when I say "you haven’t lived enough," I’m not talking about the number of years in your life, but the amount of life in your years.

What I mean is that you simply haven’t engaged in enough different activities or pursuits, you haven’t tried enough different things. There are many reasons for this. There are people who have lived genuinely unfortunate or even tragic lives and had almost no chance to engage in life in such a way that they were able to explore different paths in an attempt to find out what their own unique path is.

But we have to be real and say that, for some people, "not having lived enough" is largely a product of their own choice, or rather a series of choices, to live a passive life.

The first thing that I would say to both types of people is that it is never too late to start living. Whether you’ve been prevented from engaging in life or it was your choice, you can decide at any moment to embark on the journey of actually living your life.

What I would say specifically to the first type is: don’t dwell on your past. If you’ve been held back by other people or circumstances for most of your life, the worst thing that you can do is keep holding yourself back by believing that it is too late for you to create your own life.

What I would say specifically to the second type is that the fact that you can decide at any given moment to start living your life doesn’t mean that you should understand that as a luxury of "I can always stop living this passive way of life; I have all the time in the world." Because you clearly had that attitude up until now, and you never came to the point of saying, "I am going to start now," you always stayed at "I can, whenever I want." Recognize the urgency of living before life finds a way to give you a very real and uncomfortable sense of urgency.

You never gave anything a real chance.

Maybe you are the type of person who has been engaged in life and has been trying out different paths, but you still haven’t managed to find what is "that one thing" for you.

Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the problem is not in the things that you are trying, but in your unwillingness to commit to a single thing or a single path? Maybe you keep trying out different things without ever sticking with one of them long enough to develop a purpose or a passion.

And furthermore, maybe you are sabotaging yourself on purpose?

Once again, this is not me criticizing you or trying to give you a lecture. This is coming from someone who has been in this position.

Maybe you keep trying different things because you don’t want anything to be "that one thing."

That doesn’t make any sense, you might think. Actually, it makes perfect sense.

By deciding that this is the thing, you are accepting the responsibility to fully commit yourself to it and put the effort into it. If you don’t do these things while saying "this is the thing," you are openly betraying yourself, and you know it.

Also, by deciding that this is the thing, you are closing off or shutting down all those other potential paths and possibilities, at least for now. By choosing one door and deciding to go through it, you are closing all the other doors. And it might be the case that you are a person with plenty of doors in front of you. So closing all of them for the sake of one is a difficult choice to make. But that’s what commitment is.

If this is you, what I would tell you is this: You can keep all the doors in front of you open and get some superficial satisfaction from the fact that you have so many doors in front of you. You can spend your life going from door to door, telling yourself how great it is that you can choose any door that you want, but never actually choosing any of them. Or you can choose one door and get satisfaction and fulfillment from going through it. Closing all those other doors is a fair price to pay for what you can receive on the other side of a single door. And what people often forget is that you are not closing all the other doors once and for all. Some of them may be waiting for you on the other side of the door that you choose. And some new ones appear along the way.

The Age Problem

I understand that modern society is set up in such a way that you are expected to have your life figured out by the time you are 20. But if you look at what life really looks like, I hope we can agree that this is a ridiculous notion.

If you are a young person who is reading this but is not relieved and still feels the pressure of thinking they should have it figured out, all I can say is this: in a couple of months, or a couple of years at most, you are going to start laughing at the fact that you believed you should have your life figured out. Once you finally start laughing at it, you will laugh harder and harder with every passing month and year.

If we are not talking about making a living but rather having something to live for, the idea that there is any point in life where you are expected to have it figured out and that there is a point after which it is too late is, again, ridiculous.

And I want to emphasize the "point after which it is too late" part for those who are reading this and feel that it really is too late for them. The young ones are going to be laughing soon. Who I'm most concerned about are those who believe there is no more time or opportunity for them to discover their purpose or passion.

Why should it be too late? As long as you are breathing, as long as the spark of life exists within you, that spark can be turned into a flame.

This world is full of examples of people reinventing themselves multiple times over the course of their lives or igniting that flame for the very first time in the later stages of their lives. You are no different from those people.

The Biggest Misconception

And now for maybe the most concrete part of this conversation: what are we actually talking about here? Once again, are we talking about making a living or having something to live for?

If we are talking about a purpose, passion, or mission, I believe that we need to drop this romanticized idea that everyone can and should be making a living with it.

If you don’t hate your job, but you are able to make a decent living, and your job leaves you with enough emotional, mental, and physical energy to dedicate yourself to other things outside your job and eventually to that "one thing," you are living an amazing life.

If, while thinking about your purpose, one of your main ideas is that it needs to be something that you can make material profit with so that you can eventually transition to it as your main source of income, I’m afraid that it is not purpose or passion that you are looking for, or that, at the very least, you don’t understand what those things mean.

Furthermore, as much as I’m talking about trying out different things, your purpose or passion doesn't have to be a specific activity or an external pursuit.

Let me give you an example:

I wasn’t happy at my job as an air traffic controller. Even if a series of events and decisions didn’t lead to me leaving that job around a year ago, I believe that for me to live a fulfilled life, I would have to leave it sooner or later.

But I want to tell you about my ex-colleague who is still there. Air traffic control is not his purpose or passion, but he is living one of the most fulfilled lives that I know.

Maybe I shouldn’t be the one defining his purpose, but I can say that he is a family man in the most beautiful sense of that term. He and his wife got married out of true love. They are one of the best couples I’ve come across in my life. They complement each other in terms of their unique qualities, and they grow together as individuals. They have one beautiful daughter and are expecting another one. From what I’ve seen, they are dedicated to raising healthy, open-minded children who will know how to love themselves and respect others regardless of their differences. Something that is as great a task as you can take on in today’s society. He has a job that is not his purpose, but he doesn’t hate it. He doesn’t dread his job. He goes there every day to do what he is supposed to do while maintaining healthy relationships with his colleagues. And he is able to support his family by doing that.
Does this person need some extravagant goal in order to say that he has found his purpose? Does he need to paint, or write songs, or climb mountains? I don’t think so.

My way of life and my journey are as different from his as it gets, but I can recognize that he is one of the most fulfilled people I've met in my life. He is not only happy, and happiness is not a permanent state anyway. His life has meaning.

Hopefully you realize that the point I’m trying to make is not that your passion or purpose should not or cannot also be your source of income, or that it shouldn’t contain any kind of external goal.

My point is that each journey is unique and that there are many different ways to attain fulfillment in life.

In any case, you won't know until you give something a chance.

If all of this made any sense, I hope I helped you feel, rather than just understand, that it is never too late, but you also don’t have all the time in the world.

Finally, in the words of great Søren Kierkegaard:

"Come on out, jump in boldly."

Thank you for reading.

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