The dilemma of the 20s – the freedom. All of your potential is yet untapped, all options are unexplored, and all you have to do is choose a door to open and walk through. This awareness can be not just intimidating, but outright paralyzing.
But how do you decide?
Choosing Your Path Among Infinite Options
Millions of copies of you will exist in the future, spread across a landscape of parallel realities. Every move you take, every decision you make, eliminates countless options, eliminating alternative you’s. All you have to do is decide. But you can only choose one path.
We will miss this freedom when we grow older. Minimal commitments hold us down, free to change, choose, and grow. But I envy those who have made a decision. Those who are on a path, who have a strive so strong they cannot do anything but fight for their goals and dreams. This time can feel so daunting, like being a floating body in a vacuum, seeing people around you anchoring their feet on the ground, one by one.
Battling Uncertainty: The Stress of Choice
I don’t feel free, quite the opposite. This time is stressful; you second-guess yourself, there’s tons of outside pressure, and there is a lot of comparison – it’s not fun. Sure, mortgages, a family, and a boss and team who rely on you at certain times of the day aren’t exactly the definition of freedom either. But imagining a time when you have a stable living situation, good finances, predictability, and a clear direction seems closer to the feeling of freedom than the current state of uncertainty. It is the same feeling I get when people say they miss their teenage years; you couldn’t pay me to go through the pubescent confusion and insecurity all over again!
Life as a Continuous Stream of Choices
Bill, a wise man I met in Costa Rica, once told me that you never really choose what you do with your life. Your entire existence is a continuous stream of change and decisions, one after another. That stuck with me. But I’m not sure what to do with that information, because as much as it is meant to relieve pressure off the seemingly huge „what-do-i-do-with-my-life“-question, it appears to me that it just avoids giving an answer to it, and instead adds difficulties – more future decisions.
Contradicting Advice and Information Overload
The answers that you come across to this question all seem so vague – Do what you love and you’ll never work a day but also don’t since you don’t want to ruin your hobbies and it’s not guaranteed to match your ideal financial status. Aim for your ideal lifestyle, but also don’t waste years of education on something that doesn’t even interest you, just to end up in a soul-robbing job. Follow your heart, but also don’t waste these formative, young years that are oh so important. Choose one thing and give it your all, but keep in mind that you can drop out or quit your job to pursue your true passion at any time.
The constant bombardment of information leads to decision fatigue. How can we possibly make choices when we encounter hundreds of careers each day, many of which we have never heard of? Everything seems possible, and that’s the problem.
Many people online bash the traditional university degrees and 9-5 jobs. They make it appear that if you don’t turn yourself into a business using the internet’s limitless potential and make six figures, you haven’t tried hard enough, you’re uncreative, lazy, or unambitious. If we believe this, how can we expect anyone, really, to be happy in what they do?
So what do you do? It feels sometimes impossible to escape the „what if?“ that follows each decision. Was this the most fulfillment and happiness I could have achieved with the options I had? Am I realizing my true potential, or am I just settling? Is this truly what I want, or just what I think I want?
Finding Contentment in Future Clarity
Older folks miss their youth but I cannot wait to be in my thirties and look back on these confusing times with a mere „Phew, glad I’m over that“. Older, wiser, more confident, and with far more experience. With all of these contradictory imperatives of choice, and the fact that it’s impossible to avoid second-guessing your decisions, perhaps the best course of action is to just be okay with the uncertainty. At least until we reach that age where the overview seems clearer and we’re further down the path we’re about to take.
Inaction is more intimidating than making a decision. There may come a time when we realize that our decision was made in a series of steps, as Bill suggested. And that those began the moment you were born, and when you stand back from the image, it all makes sense, and no decision was as unexpected, unplanned, or reckless as it may appear to you now. All of the backstops and sidesteps may one day fall into place, and no time was ever wasted.
So here’s to that. From one confused 20-something to another, may we spend less time overthinking our decisions on our journey to wiser times further down our path that we’re searching for in the dark, and may we find true freedom.
What’s your experience regarding this topic? Let’s talk below!
