Written by Kate Snelling
Stop making plans. I’m not referring to plans for the weekend or what you want to eat for dinner. Little plans give you something to look forward to and are absolutely important. What I’m referring to are life plans. These days, when someone asks me what I plan to do with my degrees, with my life, I just shrug and laugh. “All I know is what I want to do next,” I tell them. I don’t have long-term goals.
Of course, there are things that I think would be nice. It would be nice to move to Vancouver or Paris or back to Alaska. It would be nice to do a PhD and become an economist or work as a hiking guide or a fashion designer. It would be nice to meet someone. Nevertheless, I refrain from setting the expectation that any of these things might happen.
Some of the “real adults” in my life might be reading this and thinking this is terrible advice. I am still young, and I obviously don’t know much, but I do know that our generation is different from the ones before us. We live in an era of rising Fascism and a climate crisis. As young people, we don’t know if the plans we make will even be possible in the future. This may seem pessimistic, but at the end of the pessimism pipeline is freedom. The freedom to pursue absolutely anything we want.
In college, I was so laser-focused on making everyone else happy, on following the classic business school to consulting career path, on reaching my goal, that each job rejection was excruciatingly painful. My depression was at its peak, and I didn’t even actually know if I wanted to work in the corporate world (spoiler alert, I didn’t). For an entire semester, as I watched my friends succeed at getting the good and right jobs, I woke up every single morning already crying at my inability to do the same.
People wonder how I am so non-chalant about the future now, but they don’t know how hard it was for me to get to this place. I didn’t have a choice to work in corporate when I moved to Alaska for a summer because I hadn’t gotten any job offers. I meant to go there for a couple months, go home, and get back to work. My perspective changed when I met other seasonal workers who exemplified this carefree mindset and were clearly much happier.
The coolest people I know are off working at hostels in Australia or doing yoga training in Costa Rica. These are the people who, instead of desperately clinging to a certain path, embrace the opportunities of life as they come. Things change, and they change unexpectedly. With a long-term goal in mind, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed.
I know people, and I know you know people, who have a rigorously scheduled life plan. Married by 29, kids by 30. Some of my best friends plan this way, and I don’t fault them for it. Don’t listen to me if you don’t want to (I know nothing, really). I just know that if I had this kind of plan, I would be very sad if I reached the finish line with nothing to show for it. Going with the ebbs and flows of life means I have no idea what will happen and at what time, and I have learned to embrace it rather than fear what is to come.
You know the episode of Gilmore Girls in which Paris doesn’t get into Harvard and has a mental breakdown in front of the whole school? I always thought both Paris and Rory were insane for not keeping their options open and having backup plans or safety schools. Because unless you are one of the few lucky ones, life almost never happens the way you want or expect. Odds are, you won’t be a Rory, so don’t be a Paris.
