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(this is a guest contribution)
What happens when the tank runs out of gas?
One moment, you’re a hopeful college senior entering the workforce. The next, you’re 10 years older and 50 pounds heavier. You don’t like your job, never really did. You may have a mild sports betting addiction. And sometimes you sit there and think: hey, this wasn’t quite the “yolo” we were all promised.
I don’t want to gatekeep stuck-ness to this archetype, though; I think feeling stuck can happen to anyone at any time. Some of the more common situations I hear when I talk to people are:
Just graduated college but not sure what to do next.
Used to like life but grew tired of it and want something new.
In their 40s and working at some corporate job they hate.
Invariably, when I talk to people who feel stuck, they have the same goal:
I must figure out what I need to do.
Sure, my description here is overly simplistic and no, I do not believe it applies to everyone. But I earnestly believe that something like this pipeline is representative of many people’s post-college experiences. Of becoming “adults.” They pick a path, and at some point realize they are not so happy about that path, but they are not sure what to do about it or what to do next.
Some people might be happy about this stagnation. But for the people who wish there was a change, who want to be doing something more but just don’t know what, I feel for you. I have been you. I often am you.
I want to spend the rest of this essay being actually helpful, and to do so, I would like to start with a hypothesis. My theory is that these people who feel the need to “know what they should be doing,” these people who feel stuck, they have all been semi-brainwashed into believing an idea that is not quite true.
And that not-true idea is that you *need* to *know* what to do with your life, and that not *knowing* is the thing stopping you from taking the next step.
My opinion is that this idea is largely fake. And it’s holding you back.
Instead, consider accepting the following: you’ll never *know* exactly what it is you want to do with your life. There will always be uncertainty. It’s not like solving a problem on your middle-school math homework. Like you do some analysis and just boom…you now know what to do with your life.
I mean you could try to make decisions that way. You could also try and make music that way. Or make friends that way. Or find a life partner that way. I’m highly doubtful it’ll lead to good outcomes.
It’s not just me who thinks this. It’s probably a pretty obvious take.
And, yet, so many people seem to believe this idea. It is how people get stuck bouncing around in academia for a decade-plus while remaining unsatisfied. It is how people stay at a job they hate for a long time until they find what they believe is the perfect replacement. If you want to get yourself un-stuck, the first thing you can do is stop pretending that you need to know what to do in order to go do it.
In 2020, author Matt Haig published a book called The Midnight Library. It’s about this girl who finds herself in a purgatory-style library at night. Each book in it represents a different version of her life; a glimpse of what things could have been like if only she had made different choices. Every book she opens whisks her away into that parallel universe to see what could have been, if only.
Real life is a little bit like this library. But I do not think people who are stuck have read many of the books.
Instead, they worked two short internships before signing the next three decades of their life away to working in corporate America. They let the majority of their environmental conditioning come from LinkedIn posts and TikTok. And they kind of just let themselves drift in this boring stasis.
And when these people do decide that their current reality is upsetting? Well, they don’t walk into the library and start opening as many books as possible to see what catches their eye. That would be too hasty. No, what they do instead is run a complex calculation to figure out which book they should read next. They try to build a formula in their head. They collect data. They talk to people. They spend 100s of hours reading about which books they could read; they try to match those books to what they believe their strengths and weaknesses are. And then maybe, after years, they open a book. Maybe they don’t.
This approach only makes sense if you think that “knowing what to do” is an important and solvable problem. That it is actually useful in any way. It isn’t, though, and so I think a more useful approach to getting un-stuck is to simply walk into the midnight library and open every book you can find.
But what if you don’t like any of the books in the midnight library? In other words, what if you agree that you should be trying new things to get un-stuck but are unsure of what you should be trying?
“I don’t have many passions,” people sometimes say. Or, “none of the things I enjoy doing can make money.” Or, “none of the options I can think of sound very interesting to me.”
To me, statements like these imply that passions are some innate part of ourselves, some DNA diceroll at birth that we have no power to change. But that doesn’t seem true, though, does it?
Is anybody born with a passion for whales?
It’s true that you are probably pre-dispositioned to like some things more than others; try pickleball and squash and you will have a preference. The only way you could create a passion for either of those, though, is by trying them and perhaps even willing yourself, for a while, to continue. And it’s that part—the “trying it”—that I don’t think people do enough of.
If you ask somebody what their passions are they will tell you, and if you ask why they will give you a list of reasons. But neither of these responses tends to hold up under scrutiny. People list passions as though they are permanent traits of their being, but I find that passions are more fleeting and flexible than that. Recently I told someone I am passionate about playing the piano, but am I? I certainly enjoy it, but I have not played in months. Am I passionate about playing the piano right now? Probably not.
Describing why passions are passions is difficult, too.
Why do you like your favorite song?
Why do you like your favorite person?
Why do you like your favorite food?
You could come up with all sorts of nice-sounding things to explain these things, but really you like the song because it sounds good, you like the person because of who they are, and you like the food because it tastes good. You don’t “know” why you like these things, you feel it.
It’s the same thing with figuring out how to spend your time or life. Using your life well is not about coming up with an equation that you repeat to yourself at night; it is not some memo that you write down and constantly look at to assure yourself you’re on the right track.
It would certainly be easier if spending your life was more of a formula. Easier to tell to yourself, easier to explain to other people. You could have some five-point thesis about why you do what you do. But, really? Is this the way we want to figure out how to spend our lives? At the risk of sounding a bit vague, I think that deciding how to spend your time is far more about what feels right than what sounds logical.
The way The Midnight Library ends is a bit anticlimactic: the main character decides not to live in any of these other lives and instead determines to make better use of her own. And perhaps the way this essay ends is a bit anticlimactic too, in that I do not have any grand self-help advice for you. There is not a 67-point framework just out of reach on my desk that will help you “know what to do.”
It’s the lack of that framework, though, that’s at the heart of solving the IDK, of stuck-ness. You don’t need to know what to do, actually. Put away the spreadsheet, put away the self-help books. There is no optimized calculation you can run to decide what to do with your life. Spending your time is maybe a bit more like how most of the greats write a song; they feel their way through it.
Ridding your brain of the idea that you must know what to do is the most effective escape here, I think. But if you are searching for practical steps, I would simply try a lot of new things. Try new things before you are completely convinced they are the right idea. Try them even if they are risky.
Trying new things can involve:
New locations
New people
New jobs
New media (read different kinds of books, watch different kinds of movies)
New routines
New hobbies
New feedback loops
Not every new step you take needs to somehow be defining what you are “doing with your life.” The new job you try doesn’t need to be your career forever. The new people you meet do not need to be your official social circle. And these steps don’t need to be huge: a new location doesn’t necessarily mean you need to abandon your current life and post up in a cabin on one of these beaches. (Though you could.)
If you want to start trying new things…here are some quick ideas for you to try out…today?:
Send cold emails to interesting companies you find on Next Play.
Choose an exercise goal like signing up for a marathon.
Start writing by joining a Writing Club.
Try to build a project that gets 10 users in the next 10 days.
Join an event hosted by somebody in the Friends of Next Play slack.
If you liked this essay, please do upvote and share with your friends. Really appreciate it!
Really love the list of ways to get unstuck, and "The Writing Club" is a new discovery!
So far the only way I've found to unblock myself is to get up and go for a walk, run or some type of physical activity. The gears up there work a bit better somehow.