Hi! I’m Z, and I have no idea what I’m doing.
Thankfully I’m not alone. During one of my recent conversations, a friend confided in me that she felt ashamed that she hadn’t found her “calling” yet, despite having gone to university, started a job, found a partner, etc: all the things we’re told are the gateways to discovering our life’s purpose.
What happened afterwards was almost cosmic, as I ended up having a conversation with an old colleague who shared with me that they were perfectly fine with their life until others made them feel panicked about not having tied their life’s purpose to their chosen occupation.
For my friends & I, who are fresh out of university and relative newcomers to the workforce, it’s intimidating to think about embarking on yet another journey to find an elusive calling when your adult life has only just begun. More importantly, being rushed to commit to something so significant when you’ve only just started figuring out who you are as has the potential to be incredibly detrimental.
Also — what is a purpose? The concept is presented with so much vagueness that discourse around it is simply not helpful. Asking for help doesn’t do much either when the only thing we’re told is “figure it out”.
While being an adult means figuring most things out on your own, you’d be forgiven for thinking that something of this magnitude would warrant asking for at least a little bit of guidance.
People of my generation often hear criticisms of how we’re “lazy”, “directionless” or (the ever-popular) “snowflakes”. But the reality is ever since we’ve been old enough to process our surroundings, all we’ve seen is a world constantly on the brink of utter chaos: 9/11, the Iraq War, the invasion of Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, rising tuition fees, Brexit, the rise of Trump, growing far-right movements in Europe, an increase in poverty, widening racial inequality, systemic gender inequality, and last but by no meant least- a global pandemic.
Is it any wonder we’re afraid to find (much less commit to) a lifelong purpose if we’ve constantly been in survival mode for most of our adult lives?
Add to that the ways in which we’re told we should use our twenties to figure stuff out, but we’re also berated for not having figured out what we didn’t know we should’ve figured out. Confused? Same.
And yet there’s a certain freedom in this as well. We don’t take things for granted, . We don’t subscribe to this idea that a “purpose” is mystical, we know that a life’s purpose can be made & unmade as many times as it needs to be in response to a situation.
We’re comfortable with being uncomfortable and that’s the perfect position to be in as we seek to find that elusive thing that fills us with passion or achieve a particular goal.
So I guess I’ll end my first piece similar to how I started it:
Hi! I’m Z, and I have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m having a great time figuring it out.
