For most of my teens I (21) had a broad but distinct vision for what I wanted my 20s to look like. It was everything I liked, I was looking forward to it, and was planning around it. Unfortunately it now seems that a central tenet of that vision will not be possible and I’m gonna have to rethink my 20s to suddenly look radically different (not sure how yet) to what I had come to anticipate. What’s more, some of the things outside of my influence that I was sorta expecting to have happened by now (first kiss etc) haven’t and I’ve found myself waiting around for them before I feel prepared to move on (they were part of the vision).
Unfortunately, since I had come to identify myself with and live in expectation of this path for my 20s, even when the central thing became impossible I tried to salvage the rest and make the side things still happen – which, as I have found, takes much more effort without that central thing tying them together. Since I’ve been planning around it for so long, I’ve sort of forgotten what alternatives there are so I don’t even know what else could be right for me (or how to find that out).
I think what makes it so hard to abandon the future I was expecting is that it gave me a sense of identity. This might also be because I didn’t like the life my parents had arranged for me during my teens. I’m afraid that if I try to go with the flow, embrace my actual (unhappy) reality and don’t try to correct my course to at least partially replicate the future that was supposed to happen, I would eventually become a different person, which discomforts me. It’s also the reason I’m afraid to try new things that could distract me from the (albeit now impossible) trajectory that I have come to identify with.
I guess this really leads me to ask what the bigger mistake that I’m making is. Why do I constantly need this future path/plan of experiences to guide me and give my life a feeling of meaning? How do I learn to let go and embrace whatever I’m served by life and live in the present without caring about where the path leads? I liked the feeling of certainty that having a (retrospective, almost?) vision of the future gave me but it made me a control freak.
TL;DR: I blindly made my life decisions based on a future path that is now long obsolete, but gave me a sense of identity and my life/struggle meaning. How can I let go of it so that I can embrace my actual situation and retain my identity whilst on a path that may end up looking completely different and unfamiliar?
Plans never go the way you expect them too. Also, this is the most vague post I’ve ever seen in my life. You said a lot of words without really saying much.
You want to make god laugh? Show him your plans.
There’s a reason we have dozens, probably hundreds of sayings about this.
Welcome to life, OP.
It is incredibly odd…isn’t it? So many words saying very little.
To OP, I think it would help others to give you advice if you say exactly what sort of plans you had that didn’t work out. Plans not working out come in all shapes and sizes, and advice for one thing doesn’t necessarily apply to another.
If it’s a relationship you seem to desire, then asking for more relationship focused advice may be more fruitful than vaguebooking and not getting much in the way of useful responses.
Hmm, I suppose it is quite vague. I just thought the problem was quite generic (and so would be its solutions) and thought the specifics would be a distraction.
Life is pretty wild.
You can literally do anythingLike, you can straight up choose the wrong career, or become a hardcore alcoholic by the time you’re 30, and no one can really stop you.
It’s pretty scary, but also pretty liberating to think about.It’s very easy to ruin your life while it’s much harder to get it straight. I think the whole “you can be anything you want to be” mentality is very idealistic and a product of survivorship bias. It shouldn’t stop you from trying by any means, just something to keep in mind.
Good insight
Also the first one and the third one make the second one so much easier.
“Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as they say. The future is important, but so is the now.
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”
- John Lennon, Beautiful Boy
And unbeknownst to me until I went to check to see if I was right about the origination (I wasn’t), “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans”
- Allen Saunders, Readers Digest, January 1957
This happened to me. I got a PhD and expected to be able to get a tenure track job in academia. Sure, it’s hard. But it wouldn’t be me that failed at it, right? Wrong. Three years later, no job, scraping by on adjunct work.
I went back to law school. Sometimes you have to redefine your life in a way that gives you new opportunities. Does it still hurt that I couldn’t get my dream job? Yeah, but I have a lot of good I can do for the world in other ways, and I’m not going to let that dream’s death prevent me from doing it.
Yeah, hearing about how hard it would be to get tenure dissuaded me from pursuing my original dream of doing a PhD. In retrospect I think I am much happier where I am now than I would’ve been, which really is what matter the most to me now. Freeing myself of the obligation of attaining my goals was actually quite nice.
Planning is well and good but your present self should be driving towards your future, not the other way around which is how this kind of feels. In some ways it strike me that you seemed to see yourself as the future state person that you wanted to be rather than who you are. It may be worth taking a step back to try and rediscover who you really are “right now” as a person, not what you think or thought you wanted to be, if the plan has been in place that long you may find that at heart you just aren’t in the same headspace as the you from all those years ago. With that done, reassess what the current you wants and set out to “make” those things happen, don’t trust for the new plan to just natural play out, each thing should at least be treated like its going to take effort. If getting a family together is a thing and really important, don’t just hang out at bars waiting for a connection to happen. Get on apps and sites and date like it’s your 2nd job. Building on that as an example, if you’re a halfway decent person you will find somebody, but it might still be person 112 and you have to put in the work to get through the first 111 to get to them.
not the other way around which is how this kind of feels.
Agreed.
In some ways it strike me that you seemed to see yourself as the future state person that you wanted to be rather than who you are.
Yeah, that seems to be the way my brain has been hard-wired to look at it rn :-( I will try to take a step back and reassess. I just have to find a way to detach myself from whatever my future plan will be which is hard.
Something about your plans was very appealing to you. What about them gave you a sense of identity? Why those plans specifically? Try to figure that out: be very specific, write it down even, and discuss it with people. Once you figure out the driving force behind your plans, use that to guide you.
Hmm, good idea. In my case it was a career that would allow me to move back to my home country (which I had to leave when I was a child). I’ll have a think about alternative ways to reinforce the identity that this path gave me.
Wow, why is it so hard for you to say what the problem is? It’s going to be a bit hard to get any advice.
I assume you wanted children but are sterile? You can still adopt. Even if that’s not what you mean, there are always alternatives in some way that let you achieve what you want, maybe not exactly like you imagined it, but a similar thing.
Everyone else already has said the “general” stuff that can be said without getting any more information from you. If you really want help, you should be ready to share some more information and answer questions people have, as well as answer people’s comments with sharing your true thoughts, not holding back like you did in your main post.
In the end, how do you get over this? You understand rationally that you can never plan the future 100%. You understand that once people achieve a goal/plan, they don’t become happy, they just try to achieve a new goal/plan. To become happy, you have to be happy with what you currently have, no matter what that is.
You don’t have to have an identity to live. Identity is irrelevant. It’s a thought-up human concept that in the grand scheme of things has no meaning. What does it matter what your identity was 100 years from now? 1000 years from now? A million years from now?
And once you rationally understand these things, you have to convince your subconscious of them as well, which is much harder and requires lots of practice.
It could be a career, or religion. For me I was planning to become a pastor, but then became an atheist. It really did throw me off. In my case I think I’m much happier than I would have been, but do kick myself because I could have been positioned much better if I wasn’t making plans in this other direction.
Yes, it was a career with moving back to my home country (which I had to leave when I was a child) attached to it.
Adopting kids ain’t easy. People always say “you could just adopt” but they don’t realize just how much expense is involved. It could easily cost $50k.
Thank you, this reply helps. You’re right, my post was quite vague, and I didn’t want children or found I was sterile, but the advice given to those people would actually perfectly fit my (completely different) situation too.
I think something has gotten messed up in our culture that makes people obsess in an unhealthy way about identity. It’s a natural concern for people in their twenties, but it gets exaggerated. Your identity is just who you really are and it is a life’s work to get to know that and to develop it, and the possibilities are much broader than you can know, especially when you are awash in a culture that is selling you identities. Don’t put yourself in a box or fit yourself into some mold by deciding on some ‘identity’. Give yourself room and let it naturally develop.
I’m really, truly not trying to be flippant. But welcome to the first taste of adulthood. What you plan for your life and what your life becomes are very different things. I am not who I expected to be. I am not in the career I expected. I don’t have the same interests I expected, and I only have like 2 friendships from my high school days that I’ve really maintained.
But the thing is, none of that is necessarily bad. I enjoy my job, but as a high schooler “municipal development” wasn’t a career to dream about, even though it can be very satisfying.
I have different friends and interests, but they’re not worse. It’s just that the world broadens as you age.
You can’t really know who you are until the training wheels come off. That’s where you’re headed by the sound of it. Is it scary and stressful? Absolutely. But when you come out of it you’ll be the person you are, not the person somebody expects you to be.
The 20s were an amazing time where everything in my life got flipped around more than once. Now that I’m a few decades past it, I can better appreciate how much I grew in that time.
I also miss having a more cooperative body.
Get yourself a good therapist. It is their job to help you answer these kinds of questions yourself.
Was your whole plan about having a family in your 20s? If not, then I don’t see how the lack of a significant other matters. What career plans do you have? What interests do you have? Also, keep in mind that validation should come from within, you shouldn’t let anyone (or their absence) define how you feel about yourself.
The only, really only, case in which you should plan that much into the future is when you’re a gov / politician / business. Plans for the average person never work out
Even for the gov and business they usually don’t work out, but they realize that “plans are useless, but planning is essential.”
Now that is a good quote
Some people learn about the limits of their control over events by meditating. Even when you stop trying to do anything, your body tries to do things and things change around you and you have the impulse to control things. Repeated exposure to this impulse eventually caused me to start laughing at how silly I was to assume that I was in control.
Maybe something like that could help you. Peace.
Plan as much as you want. Its nornal to feel uneasy about the unreliability of your plan. Dealing with uncertainty is difficult and many dont deal with it and spend life avoiding that feeling. Giving up on your plans is an option if you want.
Aim for your happy place of a neat and reliable plan. Handle failures to maintain your plan with grace and forgive yourself. Or get angry and double down on your efforts. Its all you friend. This is a life experience thing that comes to everyone who tries.
Get into therapy, if possible. I’ve learned so much from therapy (and quality therapists (I’m old)), including building a healthier sense of self that was underdeveloped due to home life stuff when I was a kid. At 38, I was finally able to love myself, something I had thought impossible. A 21yo version of me wouldn’t have been able to envision the me of today because it would seem impossible.
Maybe you only do therapy to help adjust to this one thing that you’re asking about and then you’re good. It sounds like you may not have the amount of baggage that I had. But I think it’s an incredibly valuable and useful tool. The catch is having the right therapist. Be prepared to say that it isn’t a good fit if you don’t trust the person. I find that for each good therapist (three over ~30 years), I’ve had to meet with at least one, once two, who were a bad fit.
Good luck!
