Maybe I Never Wanted the Title

The other day I caught myself staring at a job description thinking: 

wait… I could absolutely do this job. 

And then almost immediately afterward, I had another thought:  okay but do I even WANT this life?  Which honestly feels like the more terrifying question.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do next with my career, and every decision suddenly feels weirdly permanent when it’s your own life. And I KNOW that’s irrational because human beings pivot all the time. Careers evolve. People reinvent themselves at forty, fifty, seventy. Intellectually, I understand this. But emotionally, every choice still feels like I’m quietly closing doors I might never get to reopen again.

Part of what’s been making this harder is that I keep applying to jobs that, at least on paper, seem like they should make sense for me. Jobs where I read the description and think, wait… I CAN do this. 

And then I don’t get them. 

Which I know is an incredibly normal human experience, but I keep finding myself spiraling trying to understand what exactly isn’t translating. Do they think I’m not experienced enough? Do I communicate my skills poorly? Is my career too meandering to make immediate sense? Am I somehow not as good of a professionally trained hoop jumper as I thought I was?

Because for most of my life, the formula felt pretty straightforward. Learn the rules. Do the assignment well. Say the smart thing in class. Build the resume. Hit the milestone. Move forward. But life is much murkier than that.

I think part of why this hits me so hard is because I’ve spent years thinking about the ideas in Excellent Sheep, especially this tension between achievement and actual selfhood. The book talks a lot about how high-achieving people become very good at jumping through hoops without always stopping to ask whether the hoops themselves actually lead anywhere meaningful.

Which honestly feels uncomfortably familiar sometimes.

I read something recently that finally gave language to this feeling. A former student wrote an essay called “The Paradox of Potential,” where he described students at Yale as stem cells capable of becoming anything, which is exactly why they delay becoming anything at all. Possibility itself becomes the trap. And I think that’s partially what’s been happening to me because another part of me keeps thinking: 

okay… but at what point are you supposed to go build your own thing? And then immediately after that thought comes the much scarier one: what even IS my own thing?

I even worked with this amazing life coach and we did all the “design your life” exercises from the Stanford people. Odyssey Plans. Mapping different futures. The whole thing. And the funny thing is that I genuinely LOVE Odyssey Plans. I’ve gotten so many of my friends to do them with me because they soothe something VERY deep inside my professionally trained hoop jumper brain.

There’s something unbelievably comforting about sitting there with giant sheets of paper and colored markers convincing yourself that if you map the next five years correctly, everything will somehow be okay. And the plans themselves are never even that crazy. Year one was things like getting married, going on my honeymoon, continuing to learn, volunteering more, growing with mentors, maybe training for a marathon, which I’m obviously definitely completely training for and not just emotionally attached to the IDEA of training for. Then year two suddenly becomes: maybe nomad life??? Year three is like stable home, routines, regular dinners with friends, community. Then somewhere in year four I apparently decided maybe grad school? Maybe Boston?

At one point I literally drew a little circle that just said “baby.” Not even a PLAN really. Just: ✨baby✨.

And all over the page I kept writing the same words over and over again. Community. Creativity. Family. Meaningful work. Home. Somewhere else on the paper it’s like maybe build my own thing??? Maybe creative coworking space??? Maybe somehow split time between the East Coast and Maui??? Maybe super rad perfect-fit job??? Maybe everything???

Which I think is what’s funny about the whole exercise. You start by trying to map the future with the precision of a strategy consultant, but eventually the paper just turns into evidence of what you care about. Because underneath all the arrows and circles and stars and exclamation points, the desires themselves are actually pretty simple. Love people deeply. Keep creating things. Build meaningful work. Have community. Stay curious. Make a cozy life. Maybe host dinners. Maybe raise a family. Maybe continue becoming.

And honestly, there’s something very soothing about realizing some of those desires will probably remain true for most of my life even if the timeline shifts around constantly. Maybe the dinners don’t happen in year three. Maybe the grad school thing disappears entirely. Maybe the marathon never leaves the “emotionally attached to the concept” stage. Who knows, man. But I think what comforts me now is realizing the plan was never really about predicting the future correctly. It was about trying to understand what kind of life feels alive to me.

And honestly, I think I’ve probably always been like this. 

The other day I found an old “From the Editor’s Deck” letter I wrote when I was seventeen and managing editor of my high school newspaper. In it, I wrote:

“I organize things when I worry because I enjoy the impression that I am in control of my life. I’ve come to understand though… that I can’t control everything.”

Which is honestly a slightly alarming level of self-awareness for a teenager 😭.

But I think that sentence explains SO much about why things like Odyssey Plans feel so emotionally comforting to me now.

Because underneath all the charts and frameworks and five-year plans is something much simpler: the very human desire to believe life can be made manageable if you organize it correctly enough.

And honestly, somewhere in the middle of all this, I also became mildly obsessed with Life Wheels. You know the ones. Those little circles life coaches make you fill out where your existence gets divided into neat categories like career, health, relationships, family, finances, spirituality, personal growth, and then you rate each area from one to ten like you’re grading yourself.

Which, to be clear, I actually kind of love. The Life Wheel feels VERY reassuring at first. Your brain immediately goes: 

ohhhhh okay. So this is just a systems problem. 

If health is low, surge on health. If social life is low, invest there. If career is low, optimize harder. Just fill all the buckets to ten, baby.

Except the deeply inconvenient part of being alive is that human existence does not actually work like a video game. You do not eventually max out every category simultaneously and unlock Inner Peace Premium Edition. Sometimes your career is thriving while your family relationships feel distant. Sometimes you feel deeply in love and completely professionally confused. Sometimes your health improves while your creativity disappears for a while. Sometimes you’re growing enormously and also grieving something at the exact same time.

And I think that’s partially why the Paradox of Potential feels so painful too. Because part of me still wants everything. Not in a greedy way necessarily. Just… humanly. I want meaningful work and deep relationships and community and creativity and adventure and stability and family and health and enough time to actually enjoy all of it while it’s happening.

I think part of why my brain keeps spiraling around all this is because I’ve spent YEARS consuming books about how to build a meaningful life correctly. At one point I became mildly obsessed with The Defining Decade, where Meg Jay basically argues that your twenties matter enormously and you cannot just drift through them assuming everything magically works out later. Which, respectfully, is a TERRIFYING thing to read if you are already prone to existential overthinking.

At one point she talks about “doing the math backward” on your life. Like if you want partnership and kids and meaningful work and financial stability and all these different things, you actually need to realistically think through timing because there are only so many years and energy reserves available to a human being. And I remember reading that thinking: 

oh cool. LOVE that. Awesome. 

So now not only do I need to live a meaningful life, apparently I also need to reverse-engineer the spreadsheet correctly???

And then on the complete opposite end of the emotional spectrum, I also adore The Art of Making Memories. There’s a section where Meik Wiking talks about how many of his most vivid memories came from his twenties because that period of life is still so full of novelty. New cities. New people. New identities. Before routine fully settles in. He describes this summer in Spain in incredibly specific detail, and I remember reading it thinking: oh my god. That’s happening to me RIGHT NOW. Like maybe this is the era someday-future-me will ache to remember.

And I think that’s the strange tension I keep living inside lately. Part of me feels like I’m racing a clock, trying to build a meaningful life before time quietly hardens around me. Trying to choose correctly. Trying to maximize possibility before routine inevitably settles in. And another part of me keeps whispering: slow down. You are inside the thing already.

Which is probably why Soul hits me so hard every time I watch it.

Joe spends the entire movie believing his purpose in life is becoming a successful jazz musician. He says, “Music is all I think about. From the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I fall asleep at night. I was born to play.” And when you’re ambitious, that mindset sounds incredibly noble at first. Focused. Meaningful. Certain. But then the movie slowly starts dismantling that framework piece by piece.

There’s this montage where Joe looks back at his life, and instead of triumphant success after triumphant success, it’s mostly disappointments. Auditions. Rejections. “Sorry, Joe.” “Not what we’re looking for.” Quiet little heartbreaks stretched across years. And honestly, that part wrecks me every time because it feels so painfully familiar. Not just career-wise. Existentially.

Because I think so many of us quietly evaluate our lives by only counting the moments that resemble success. We dismiss entire years because they didn’t produce the outcome we thought they would. We treat ordinary living like filler content between achievements.

Meanwhile, 22 spends the movie collecting tiny scraps of being alive like they’re treasures. Steam rising off a slice of pizza. The way sunlight flickers through tree leaves when you look up while walking. Music drifting out of somebody’s apartment window at night. The feeling of wind hitting your face through the car window. A conversation that lasts longer than expected. Standing in a crowded city suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that everybody around you is living an entire life too.

Tiny moments so ordinary they almost disappear while they’re happening, and yet somehow those are the moments 22 fights hardest to keep.

At one point, 22 says maybe their purpose is just sky-watching or walking around, and Joe immediately responds, “Those aren’t purposes, 22. That’s just regular old living.” And then the movie quietly asks the question that has been haunting me ever since: what if regular old living IS the point?

Because after Joe finally gets the performance he has dreamed about for years, the thing he thought would finally make his entire life feel meaningful, he still feels strangely empty afterward. And that’s when Dorothea Williams tells him the fish story.

A young fish swims up to an older fish and says, “I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.” “The ocean?” the older fish says. “That’s what you’re in right now.” “This?” says the young fish. “This is water. What I want is the ocean.”

And honestly I think that’s my entire career crisis.

I keep thinking meaning exists somewhere slightly ahead of me. In the next job. The next title. The next opportunity. The moment where everything finally clicks into place and I become the fully realized version of myself I’ve been trying to reach this whole time.

Meanwhile, I’m already inside a life. It just doesn’t FEEL dramatic enough from the middle. It just feels like water.

And I think that’s the thing slowly shifting for me now. I still want meaningful work. I still want to build things that matter to people. I still want to help tell stories that outlive the moment they were created in. Ambition itself is not the problem. But I think somewhere along the way, a lot of us accidentally started asking careers to answer existential questions they were never designed to solve.

We want work to explain who we are. We want success to confirm our identity. We want one perfect path that proves our life is unfolding correctly. And maybe that’s too much pressure to place on any job.

Because the more I think about it, the more I realize the real danger was never choosing the wrong thing. It was staying frozen because I was too afraid to choose anything at all.

The Paradox of Potential makes it feel like committing to one path means losing every other possible version of your life forever. But I don’t actually think the choice is between one thing and everything. I think the real choice is between one thing and nothing. Because if I never commit to something, I don’t remain infinite. I just remain stuck.

And maybe life is less about uncovering one singular perfect purpose and more about continuing to move through it awake. Continuing to build, to love people, and to notice things while they’re happening.