Estimated reading time: 22 minutes
I’m very lost. I have no sense of direction at all.
I probably should be seeing a counselor. I always feel like I’m just hovering around and waiting for life to bestow upon me a magical path hoping something sticks and when that happens all the chips fall as they may. I’ve been trying a few things, from finance, to Digital marketing (I hate) and now some non-profit, I don’t know.
I’ll keep on trying.
I don’t really want 1 career I kind of want to do multiple endeavors. I don’t want to sell my soul for one company until I’m 65 and retired. Heck no. I want to change that. I want to wake up feeling like I have a passion for something.
Some people are lucky enough to know what they want from birth and I’m over here mulling over on that for so long.
Dude, I’m 27 years old and it’s dawning on me that my life is quite dull and empty. I am Walter Mitty on steroids. I afraid of what I’m turning into every day. I look myself in the mirror and despise how I have lived my life, I say to myself- What the hell is wrong with you!”. I’ve missed all kind of opportunities – the whole nine yards – making lifelong friends, partying like there’s no tomorrow and hooking up with girls. Oh..hooking up(you know that part was coming), I’m ashamed of myself it’s a struggle that its taking me too long to get over my failure to be intimate with women. I really don’t know how to hook up with a girl and how does that even work. in life that I don’t think I can replicate. I wish I went away to college to challenge myself and live a carefree life at the time and meet people. Haven’t moved out at all, not even once.
How do I restart that my own engine again so to speak? It like I’ve been stranded on the passenger side of the car chained onto it without getting a move on.
What Did I Miss?
The customary way straight white dudes have dealt with feeling stuck and being afraid that they’re leading terminally boring lives has been to go somewhere – usually Burning Man, sometimes Peru – and taking a heroic dose of hallucinogens, experiencing Baby’s First Ego Death and going from there.
More seriously, unless you really want to find a regional Burn, a lot is going to come down to “where do you put your energy?”
Hang onto that thought for a moment though; we’ll be coming back to it a few times over the course of this. But before we do, there’re a few other things you should be doing first. One is going to be taking stock of what you’re actually worried about. Because – and I’m going to be blunt here – everything you talk about is practically cliché, and I think there’s a lot of needing to sort out who you are and what you actually want before you start googling “Ayahuasca ceremonies near me”.
Right off the bat, I can take one of those fears off your plate… you don’t need to worry that you’re going to be working for the same company for your entire life. That’s a relic from a bygone era, one where people had way more job security than we do now. The average tenure at any one job for your generation tends to max out at 4 years and usually ends up being closer to 2 and a half.
(I didn’t say I wasn’t going to replace it with new problems…)
I think the more salient issue is that I strongly suspect that there’s a lot of “I should…” going on rather than “I want…”; that is, you’re responding to what you think you’re supposed to want to do, and giving yourself weird, arbitrary and artificial deadlines and windows to accomplish it in, and not fully appreciating what it is you think you’re missing out on.
Case in point: “making lifelong friends”. I’m not entirely sure what window you think you’ve missed here, or why you think it’s too late. The first and most obvious point is that you literally have no idea who’s going to be a lifelong friend and who isn’t until you, y’know, die.
Social circles grow and shrink throughout one’s life, and friends do come and go at different stages of life. The people you were friends with in high-school may or may not be people you’re friends with in your 40s, or they may be people you don’t see after college. People you made friends with in college may, likewise, be in your life for decades, or just for years. And even people who are in your life for the majority of it aren’t guaranteed to be part of it until the end.
Just as importantly though, is that closeness of those friendships or their importance is neither measured by their longevity nor is it a guarantee of it. You can have friends who may be like a brother or sister for years, but drift apart over time. Not because anybody did anything wrong, but simply because who you are now isn’t who you were then and the two of you have simply reached the natural end point of your friendship. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t or weren’t important or significant; it just means that your lives went in different directions.
And there’s no reason why you can’t make new and important friends now. It may be easier when you’re younger, because circumstances support it more readily than later in life… but that’s just a matter of how much effort you’re willing to invest.
The same thing applies to college. You could go to college as soon as the next semester if you so choose. You just have to get accepted and be able to pay tuition. People go to college at many different ages or stages of their lives – whether it’s for re-training for a new career, to finally get their degree, or just because. When I was in school, I had classes with folks in their 30s, 50s and even 70s, and it was entirely normal.
Now this may come with compromises – you may have to take night classes to fit it into your work schedule, you may choose to go to a community college first and get credits that you can then transfer to a bigger school – but there’s certainly nothing saying you can’t still get the college experience.
Now if you’re talking about living in a dorm and having a meal plan… yeah that’s not likely. But if that’s what you’re looking for, honestly, that’s a matter of finding the right apartment or condo sublet, not just going to school.
But I think the bigger issue here is that a lot of what you’re talking about isn’t about what you missed out on. Some of what you describe is less about what you missed and is rather about what you miss. Like nostalgia, this tends to be more about “I miss the days when things felt simpler and easier because I didn’t have to think about X, Y and Z like I do now”, than how that era was manifestly better.
But when we’re talking about “I wish I had had these experiences”, often they’re not actually talking about having genuinely wanted to have those experiences but couldn’t. They’re talking about an entirely different issue. I work with a lot of coaching clients who talk about all the things that they didn’t do when they supposedly had the chance. When we really interrogate those desires, it quickly becomes clear that the issue is that they want to be the KIND of person who does those things. But they aren’t. And that’s the tension they’re feeling.
That sounds like a lot of what you’re dealing with as well. “Partying like there’s no tomorrow” is a prime example, and it’s a good place to dig in, because I have a couple serious questions for you. I know you’re going to have a knee-jerk response to them, and I want you to ignore that and really think about it before you answer: what do you think partying like there’s no tomorrow means? Do you even like to party?
I’m being serious here and I want you to really think about this. What does “partying like there’s no tomorrow” look like to you, and is there anything – literally anything – in your life that you like to do that even vaguely resembles it? Do you, for example, like going to rowdy bars, loud and raucous concerts or popular night clubs? Do you drink at all, never mind get drunk, and do you actually enjoy drinking?
I’m asking because the odds are good that the answer to a lot of this is “no”, and that’s going to tell you why you haven’t exactly been partying until the bars close and the cops shut it down. Not because you lack friends but because that’s not something you’re actually into.
If you’re not someone who really enjoys a loud, smokey, frequently chaotic environment full of people who are varying stages of drunk, then to be perfectly frank, I think you’re dealing with “I want to be a different person” rather than being happy with who you are.
Now I realize that if you don’t like who you are, this sounds like I’m telling you that you’re fucked. I’m not. What I’m telling you is that you’re wishing for something that doesn’t exist – a genie or a brain-swapping device that will wipe your personality and replace it with a new one, so that you feel like someone who does those things… assuming you even want them instead of what they represent.
Which is what brings me back to “where do you put your energy?” Here’s the thing about who “you” are – the general sense of “self” that defines you: it’s what you do. You could be someone who goes out and parties. You just have to go out and do it. You may be awkward and as ungainly as a socially anxious baby deer at first, but there’s nothing stopping you from being a fixture on the club scene. You could even put time and energy into being someone who throwsparties – rent a venue, hire entertainment, source booze, hire servers, print flyers, boom. You just have to start doing it.
The same goes for moving out. You could move out tomorrow. You could make friends. You could do a hell of a lot of things if you decide you want to. You just have to do it.
The question is “why haven’t you”?
That’s actually something I want you to do. I want you to list some of the things you feel like you’ve “missed”, and answer these questions for each:
1. WHY did you miss out on these?
2. Why aren’t you doing those things now?
3. Looking at those reasons, what steps are you taking to overcome them?
4. If the answer is “nothing”… why not?
If you’re willing to be honest, you’ll have a much better idea of what’s holding you back and what you need to do to start making progress.
And I want to be clear here: the answer of “it’s too late” is both incorrect factually and incorrect for you. You need to be honest with yourself, because I suspect the real answer is in the life you imagine, it all just happens for you. You’re picturing a life where all the foundations were laid long before and you’re just stepping into it now. Someone else throws the parties, you just have to attend. You just have friends, you didn’t have to go through the process of meeting them, connecting with them and building those friendships. You didn’t have to learn how to meet and talk to women through trial and error, you’re just suddenly someone who does.
That’s the appeal of the fantasy; all the hard work happened off screen and you just get to reap the rewards right away. But that’s not how life works, unfortunately, and unless you’re able to find the Time Trapper or make a deal with Mephisto, you’re shit out of luck. So you’re going to have to do it the hard way – step by step, via trial and error, and making all the various sacrifices and compromises and figure out how you’re going to pay the opportunity costs.
As harsh as I know that sounds I need you recognize that what I’m telling you is that you absolutely can do those things. You just have to be willing to do the work to get there.
Now I’ll be self-serving and point out that I offer a free course called The Jumpstart Sequence that will teach you a lot about getting your life unstuck, and I suggest you sign up for it. But if you want to start right now, right this instant? Then I suggest that you pick one thing – just one – that you missed and want to change. More than one and you’re going to burn out before you get anywhere near your goal.
Maybe it’s moving out and getting your own place. Maybe it’s travel or going to college. Doesn’t matter. Pick one thing and start taking actual steps towards accomplishing it.
Want to move out? OK, start by locating an apartment or answer an ad from someone looking for roommates. If you can’t afford it yet, open a savings account and put… let’s say 20% of every paycheck in it until you have a nest egg that would cover two months average rent and a security deposit.
Want to go to college? Same story: decide where you might want to go and apply. If you need help covering tuition, you may need to research loans or choose to attend part time.
Want more friends? Go out and be social; I’ve got a massive archive you can read through and a whole bunch of books and workbooks to help you figure it out.
The only hard piece of advice I will give you – and I say this as someone who spent decades pursuing a career that I ultimately had to admit I didn’t want and wasn’t suited for: make sure that you actually want those things before you invest a lot of time, energy and money into it.
You’re as stuck as you choose to be. Much of getting unstuck is choosing a path and then actually following it. There’re always going to be obstacles to pursuing your goals; part of achieving those goals is figuring out how to overcome those obstacles and if you think that the result will be worth the cost.
Good luck.
I’m very lost. I have no sense of direction at all.
I probably should be seeing a counselor. I always feel like I’m just hovering around and waiting for life to bestow upon me a magical path hoping something sticks and when that happens all the chips fall as they may. I’ve been trying a few things, from finance, to Digital marketing (I hate) and now some non-profit, I don’t know.
I’ll keep on trying.
I don’t really want 1 career I kind of want to do multiple endeavors. I don’t want to sell my soul for one company until I’m 65 and retired. Heck no. I want to change that. I want to wake up feeling like I have a passion for something.
Some people are lucky enough to know what they want from birth and I’m over here mulling over on that for so long.
Dude, I’m 27 years old and it’s dawning on me that my life is quite dull and empty. I am Walter Mitty on steroids. I afraid of what I’m turning into every day. I look myself in the mirror and despise how I have lived my life, I say to myself- What the hell is wrong with you!”. I’ve missed all kind of opportunities – the whole nine yards – making lifelong friends, partying like there’s no tomorrow and hooking up with girls. Oh..hooking up(you know that part was coming), I’m ashamed of myself it’s a struggle that its taking me too long to get over my failure to be intimate with women. I really don’t know how to hook up with a girl and how does that even work. in life that I don’t think I can replicate. I wish I went away to college to challenge myself and live a carefree life at the time and meet people. Haven’t moved out at all, not even once.
How do I restart that my own engine again so to speak? It like I’ve been stranded on the passenger side of the car chained onto it without getting a move on.
What Did I Miss?
The customary way straight white dudes have dealt with feeling stuck and being afraid that they’re leading terminally boring lives has been to go somewhere – usually Burning Man, sometimes Peru – and taking a heroic dose of hallucinogens, experiencing Baby’s First Ego Death and going from there.
More seriously, unless you really want to find a regional Burn, a lot is going to come down to “where do you put your energy?”
Hang onto that thought for a moment though; we’ll be coming back to it a few times over the course of this. But before we do, there’re a few other things you should be doing first. One is going to be taking stock of what you’re actually worried about. Because – and I’m going to be blunt here – everything you talk about is practically cliché, and I think there’s a lot of needing to sort out who you are and what you actually want before you start googling “Ayahuasca ceremonies near me”.
Right off the bat, I can take one of those fears off your plate… you don’t need to worry that you’re going to be working for the same company for your entire life. That’s a relic from a bygone era, one where people had way more job security than we do now. The average tenure at any one job for your generation tends to max out at 4 years and usually ends up being closer to 2 and a half.
(I didn’t say I wasn’t going to replace it with new problems…)
I think the more salient issue is that I strongly suspect that there’s a lot of “I should…” going on rather than “I want…”; that is, you’re responding to what you think you’re supposed to want to do, and giving yourself weird, arbitrary and artificial deadlines and windows to accomplish it in, and not fully appreciating what it is you think you’re missing out on.
Case in point: “making lifelong friends”. I’m not entirely sure what window you think you’ve missed here, or why you think it’s too late. The first and most obvious point is that you literally have no idea who’s going to be a lifelong friend and who isn’t until you, y’know, die.
Social circles grow and shrink throughout one’s life, and friends do come and go at different stages of life. The people you were friends with in high-school may or may not be people you’re friends with in your 40s, or they may be people you don’t see after college. People you made friends with in college may, likewise, be in your life for decades, or just for years. And even people who are in your life for the majority of it aren’t guaranteed to be part of it until the end.
Just as importantly though, is that closeness of those friendships or their importance is neither measured by their longevity nor is it a guarantee of it. You can have friends who may be like a brother or sister for years, but drift apart over time. Not because anybody did anything wrong, but simply because who you are now isn’t who you were then and the two of you have simply reached the natural end point of your friendship. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t or weren’t important or significant; it just means that your lives went in different directions.
And there’s no reason why you can’t make new and important friends now. It may be easier when you’re younger, because circumstances support it more readily than later in life… but that’s just a matter of how much effort you’re willing to invest.
The same thing applies to college. You could go to college as soon as the next semester if you so choose. You just have to get accepted and be able to pay tuition. People go to college at many different ages or stages of their lives – whether it’s for re-training for a new career, to finally get their degree, or just because. When I was in school, I had classes with folks in their 30s, 50s and even 70s, and it was entirely normal.
Now this may come with compromises – you may have to take night classes to fit it into your work schedule, you may choose to go to a community college first and get credits that you can then transfer to a bigger school – but there’s certainly nothing saying you can’t still get the college experience.
Now if you’re talking about living in a dorm and having a meal plan… yeah that’s not likely. But if that’s what you’re looking for, honestly, that’s a matter of finding the right apartment or condo sublet, not just going to school.
But I think the bigger issue here is that a lot of what you’re talking about isn’t about what you missed out on. Some of what you describe is less about what you missed and is rather about what you miss. Like nostalgia, this tends to be more about “I miss the days when things felt simpler and easier because I didn’t have to think about X, Y and Z like I do now”, than how that era was manifestly better.
But when we’re talking about “I wish I had had these experiences”, often they’re not actually talking about having genuinely wanted to have those experiences but couldn’t. They’re talking about an entirely different issue. I work with a lot of coaching clients who talk about all the things that they didn’t do when they supposedly had the chance. When we really interrogate those desires, it quickly becomes clear that the issue is that they want to be the KIND of person who does those things. But they aren’t. And that’s the tension they’re feeling.
That sounds like a lot of what you’re dealing with as well. “Partying like there’s no tomorrow” is a prime example, and it’s a good place to dig in, because I have a couple serious questions for you. I know you’re going to have a knee-jerk response to them, and I want you to ignore that and really think about it before you answer: what do you think partying like there’s no tomorrow means? Do you even like to party?
I’m being serious here and I want you to really think about this. What does “partying like there’s no tomorrow” look like to you, and is there anything – literally anything – in your life that you like to do that even vaguely resembles it? Do you, for example, like going to rowdy bars, loud and raucous concerts or popular night clubs? Do you drink at all, never mind get drunk, and do you actually enjoy drinking?
I’m asking because the odds are good that the answer to a lot of this is “no”, and that’s going to tell you why you haven’t exactly been partying until the bars close and the cops shut it down. Not because you lack friends but because that’s not something you’re actually into.
If you’re not someone who really enjoys a loud, smokey, frequently chaotic environment full of people who are varying stages of drunk, then to be perfectly frank, I think you’re dealing with “I want to be a different person” rather than being happy with who you are.
Now I realize that if you don’t like who you are, this sounds like I’m telling you that you’re fucked. I’m not. What I’m telling you is that you’re wishing for something that doesn’t exist – a genie or a brain-swapping device that will wipe your personality and replace it with a new one, so that you feel like someone who does those things… assuming you even want them instead of what they represent.
Which is what brings me back to “where do you put your energy?” Here’s the thing about who “you” are – the general sense of “self” that defines you: it’s what you do. You could be someone who goes out and parties. You just have to go out and do it. You may be awkward and as ungainly as a socially anxious baby deer at first, but there’s nothing stopping you from being a fixture on the club scene. You could even put time and energy into being someone who throwsparties – rent a venue, hire entertainment, source booze, hire servers, print flyers, boom. You just have to start doing it.
The same goes for moving out. You could move out tomorrow. You could make friends. You could do a hell of a lot of things if you decide you want to. You just have to do it.
The question is “why haven’t you”?
That’s actually something I want you to do. I want you to list some of the things you feel like you’ve “missed”, and answer these questions for each:
1. WHY did you miss out on these?
2. Why aren’t you doing those things now?
3. Looking at those reasons, what steps are you taking to overcome them?
4. If the answer is “nothing”… why not?
If you’re willing to be honest, you’ll have a much better idea of what’s holding you back and what you need to do to start making progress.
And I want to be clear here: the answer of “it’s too late” is both incorrect factually and incorrect for you. You need to be honest with yourself, because I suspect the real answer is in the life you imagine, it all just happens for you. You’re picturing a life where all the foundations were laid long before and you’re just stepping into it now. Someone else throws the parties, you just have to attend. You just have friends, you didn’t have to go through the process of meeting them, connecting with them and building those friendships. You didn’t have to learn how to meet and talk to women through trial and error, you’re just suddenly someone who does.
That’s the appeal of the fantasy; all the hard work happened off screen and you just get to reap the rewards right away. But that’s not how life works, unfortunately, and unless you’re able to find the Time Trapper or make a deal with Mephisto, you’re shit out of luck. So you’re going to have to do it the hard way – step by step, via trial and error, and making all the various sacrifices and compromises and figure out how you’re going to pay the opportunity costs.
As harsh as I know that sounds I need you recognize that what I’m telling you is that you absolutely can do those things. You just have to be willing to do the work to get there.
Now I’ll be self-serving and point out that I offer a free course called The Jumpstart Sequence that will teach you a lot about getting your life unstuck, and I suggest you sign up for it. But if you want to start right now, right this instant? Then I suggest that you pick one thing – just one – that you missed and want to change. More than one and you’re going to burn out before you get anywhere near your goal.
Maybe it’s moving out and getting your own place. Maybe it’s travel or going to college. Doesn’t matter. Pick one thing and start taking actual steps towards accomplishing it.
Want to move out? OK, start by locating an apartment or answer an ad from someone looking for roommates. If you can’t afford it yet, open a savings account and put… let’s say 20% of every paycheck in it until you have a nest egg that would cover two months average rent and a security deposit.
Want to go to college? Same story: decide where you might want to go and apply. If you need help covering tuition, you may need to research loans or choose to attend part time.
Want more friends? Go out and be social; I’ve got a massive archive you can read through and a whole bunch of books and workbooks to help you figure it out.
The only hard piece of advice I will give you – and I say this as someone who spent decades pursuing a career that I ultimately had to admit I didn’t want and wasn’t suited for: make sure that you actually want those things before you invest a lot of time, energy and money into it.
You’re as stuck as you choose to be. Much of getting unstuck is choosing a path and then actually following it. There’re always going to be obstacles to pursuing your goals; part of achieving those goals is figuring out how to overcome those obstacles and if you think that the result will be worth the cost.
Good luck.
