Cast Away: an interlude on finding your way

I’ve been trying to write this piece for the last several weeks if not longer, and for whatever reason it just hasn’t felt worthy of publishing. No matter how many times I rewrite it, something feels like it’s missing. I don’t want to keep spiraling and just playing with the same words over and over though, so it’s time to let it go. I hope something in it resonates with you or inspires you to share your own piece of the puzzle that I missed. 

If you talk to someone in their 20s or 30s, most will express some form of “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” when talking about the current state of their life. No matter how a conversation starts, it always leads back to that. We all feel like we’ve lost our direction or never had one to begin with. That’s starting to weigh on people, forcing them to reconsider their life up to this point. Some want to quit their job, while others want to go back to school or to take a gap year in South America. None of the options feel quite right, leading to this constant gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs. We’re just guessing at what would make us happy or more fulfilled. There’s also so much going on in the world that we’re always exchanging one worry for another all while that more personal existential anxiety percolates under the surface. 

Job uncertainty is draining a lot of the people I talk to. Most of us are in careers that we didn’t choose which are probably going to be done by AI in 15 years. Even those of us who got more interesting degrees end up on the safe route because of how precarious the world is. There’s a reason that so many people with psych and poli-sci degrees are in management consulting. (No shade, we all do what we got to.) We all want to do something more fulfilling but that feels impossible when we see people who follow their passions get priced out of every major city. We’re forced to pick between doing something we’re interested in or staying in the place we call home. This takes a toll on the whole community. Cities that used to be known for their art or music scene have all lost their spark in recent years because of this. Once thriving artist hotspots are now filled with vacant office buildings and “luxury” apartments. Though, most of us with “professional” jobs can barely afford to live there ourselves. Homeownership feels like a catch-22, you can either be a renter your whole life or put everything you have into a fixer-upper barely scraping by each month. The American Dream has always been a half-empty promise with limited access depending on who you are. Yet, there were shades of truth in it, the average person did have a chance to live a somewhat comfortable middle-class life. Now that feels like it’s slipped away.

Making matters worse is that we’re reminded of our fears every time we open our phones. Our compulsive doomscrolling is filled with news about calamities, layoffs, and dire predictions about our future or that of our yet-to-be-born kids. It’s like having notifications turned on for the fall of the Roman Empire. (I know, I know, all men think about…) All of this leads to us not only feeling unsure about our own lives but everyone else’s. Whether it’s the fame economy making us all feel like everyone is more important than us, or the attention economy where everything we own is trying to get us addicted, our brains are gradually breaking. It feels like even if we did want to do something different we can’t because we can’t think straight. We’re stressed out beyond belief and never get a break from any of it. Our nervous system is meant for flight, fight, or freeze, but most of us can’t fight or run away from modern problems, so we freeze. In that freezing, we default to the worst what-ifs. It’s catastrophic thinking all day every day. What if we never end up with a fulfilling job? What if we never get to live a life like our favorite influencer? What if we never get our dream house? What if we never find our way? We can’t help but go to extremes because that’s all we see on our phones. I won’t sidetrack us with more details here, but if you’re interested, check out some older pieces where I explore these themes.

Writing about some of these issues was stressful in itself, living it every day is a whole other story. From the moment we get out of bed we’re under pressure to succeed in the face of all of these global challenges while handling everything in our personal lives. Success is becoming a lot to ask of people, especially when we don’t even know what it is we want to succeed at. For most of us, it isn’t any of this. That’s why we’re all asking the same questions. There’s this palpable sense that we all want something more but no one knows what more means. We’re all scrambling trying to just survive in this chaotic world. So, I guess that brings us to the ultimate question. What is it we do from here? If I had the answer, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. What I can say in hopefully the least cheesy way possible, is that just asking the question means something. Existential crises aren’t fun but they remind us that there is something existential. We’re all alive and living through this together. Things are gnarly right now, but if they weren’t we wouldn’t be thinking so hard about what we want our lives to look like. We’d just be sitting complacently at our desks waiting for retirement. 

Days can feel incredibly heavy when you don’t know what to do or how to navigate what’s going on. I won’t tell you that things are better than they are, but I will tell you that heaviness isn’t the only possibility. Today may suck but that doesn’t mean tomorrow will. It’s easy to weigh yourself down more by piling on all the what-ifs. A piece of advice that stuck with me is about staying close to experience and grounded in reality. I didn’t really know what that meant until recently. We forget that life itself is a what-if, and we’ll never know what the next moment will bring. Things could go terrible but they go better than we ever expected. That person you’ve been waiting for could be behind the next door, a new career a call away, or a life-changing experience may come from a random conversation at a bar. These are all what-if’s too. Life is an adventure, the unknown is the point. Bad shit happens but we underestimate how capable we are of moving past it and growing from it. More than that, the unexpected is where we find the most joy. It’s scary as fuck to think “What if I never find my purpose or direction in life?”, but there isn’t one prescribed direction. All we can do is respond to what happens and make the best of it, navigating along the way. 

We also can't just wait around for everything to go right to enjoy life. Life is about living. There are little moments every day that mean something. I forgot that and let all of the existential what-ifs get in the way. I was so preoccupied with trying to find a direction that I wasn’t doing a great job of appreciating everything else in my life. Trying to brute force my way to purpose only stressed me out and took more of my energy. What snapped me out of it was a piece of art, the Pixar movie Soul. I won’t explain the plot, but it reminded me that life is much more than our “purpose”. We can have hopes and dreams for what we want our lives to be, but that’s not our purpose. Our purpose is to live. Living means enjoying that new album on the subway, cooking dinner with your loved ones, or going for an after-work walk. Maybe it’s even just taking a minute to breathe and notice your surroundings. Doing the work to figure out where we might want to go is cool, but that doesn’t mean life is meaningless if we’re not there yet. We might never make it, but we will always have those little moments. 

I don’t know if I have to say this but I didn’t find bliss after watching a Pixar movie. I do my best to appreciate the little moments, but I’m still stressed just like you. It’s a lot to build a life in this seemingly broken world. Like everyone else, I want to find whatever it is I’m looking for. Some days I want to just run away to the forest or open a surf shop in Mexico. What keeps me going are the small things and people in my life. We’re all trying to figure this shit out together, and in doing that we’re creating light in the darkness. Memories and experiences we have together are worth more than finding a purpose, especially when everything else feels so bleak. I wish that we had an easier go of things and didn’t inherit a trashed planet where feudalism got a reboot with billionaires replacing kings. Despite that, I have hope. Don’t ask me why, because sometimes it doesn’t even make sense to me, but I do still have hope. Not hope in the classic American Dream where there’s nothing to worry about except what’s for dinner, but hope for a life I’m grateful to have lived and look back at with joy. I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t hold on to that hope. Even though we feel trapped I refuse to believe that’s the end of our story. As hard as it is to believe, we’re not stuck. I write so much about how social media hurts us, and it is, but there is a positive. It’s a window into the possibility of life. We’re all on this weird adventure and sometimes you have to say fuck it and take a leap. Sometimes you also have to relax and just enjoy the small moments. I’m grateful to be here. I want to appreciate the now and everyone in it. That’s the only way we move forward. Again I don’t know what a new path looks like, but I do know it’s possible. If I made it here, then all of us can make it further.