What should I do with my Life?

So it can be hard not to think about the future.

I don't know how age changes this fact, but I do know that being young makes it easy to live your life with long term goals as pretty much the only thing you have in sight.

The main downside of that is that people have no idea what they should be planning on doing with their lives when they are making the plans about what they want to do with their lives.

Listen to the people that love their jobs. My dad is a great example. He works as a teacher at a local school, and loves the job most of the time, but my dad graduated as an Econ Major, got his masters and went into business.

He left that job after less than a year to raise our family, and I will always give my dad a lot of credit for being able to give up on his plans to do what was really important.

Nowadays we spend all of our childhood, adolescence, and most of our early adult life preparing for a job. Some of us may find ourselves where we want to be but most of us just have to make do with where we end up, and spending so many years working for a goal, whether it's to be a doctor or a PT or a lawyer, makes it so hard to give up and acknowledge that we may have wasted our time.

This is coming from a college student who is wasting his time, and none of this is to say that we shouldn't have plans. We just shouldn't overvalue them or build up our goal to where it will stop us from living a meaningful life outside our career.

A great irony of college life is that we're supposed to make plans for our career when we have the least possible idea of what we ought to do. Some of us realize that we made a gut decision and stuck with it and that's the only reason we're studying what we're studying or working where we're working, but few realize just how dangerous it is to overvalue your own ideas and dreams.

This reality check shouldn't destroy or even make us doubt our dreams; it should just remind us to keep our minds open to opportunities for relationships or experiences outside the course we've marked.