I am writing this to fellow ‘kids’ like me who are really confused right now, in their mid-20 iteration of their humble earthly life. Especially for the ones out there who are screaming left and right to look for answers or find a footing in the merciless storm that’s life.
In a few months, I’m going to hit 25. It is quite hard to imagine that I’ve been a freaking adult for a while now! The improvised swords, lightsabers, sheet capes, stick collection (everyone has it right?), and the toys in my room make it even harder to process this transition. And I am here, about to preach something, like a guy who has it all figured out!
Truth is, I have zero clue! And probably I’ll never figure out anything when it comes to life. Because there is nothing to find out about it in the first place.
Accept it or not, life … just happens. And the harder truth? It doesn’t care about your plans.
Planning is a crude and abstract thing to do and it’s not really that fun to do.
Take me for example. Each and every moment from my kindergarten to engineering was meticulously planned. In hindsight, I’d have turned out the same anyway. Planning only sucked the gist of life. It limited the paths ahead on nothing but presumptive guesses. I had to break a few norms here and there to make it interesting again.
The thing is, if you try to plan your life ahead beyond what you can see, you’ll certainly have some clue about your future, and you will start expecting something to happen. You run simulations in your mind, you start to feel like you are honing in on something. But at the same time, you forget that your vision narrows into a bunch of paths and leave the rest unexplored.
Overplanning prematurely sucks out the energy from you, which you ultimately need for living in that moment. It gets even worse when you let others get involved.
At this stage of life where things are still transitioning, the world around me expects me to have a working plan in place. Not a day goes by where someone tries to plan my life for me. And on top of it all, as an only child, with every responsibility pounding on me, it’s nothing short of an uphill battle against a legion of dragons with nothing but sticks and rocks.
I stopped planning a long time ago! I started making choices as life happened. I do what makes me happy, with no expectation or clue what comes next. Right or wrong, it’s not boring! I live in the present, and I enjoy that. And as for the unspoilt future, it is so enticing and thrilling. Having experienced this, how could I ruin all this by planning?
In Yoda’s voice Planning is the path to the darkness. Planning leads to over thinking. Over thinking leads to contemplating life. Contemplating life leads to depression.
The combination of good and bad (aka not-so-serious) choices is what makes the moments of my life interesting. If I were to plan a secure life in my twenties and find myself a job that would take the time away from my passion for exploring, I’d rather get bitten by a zombie and walk ten thousand kilometres with a computer keyboard in my hand.
Of course, I do need to pay my bills. My projects help me to do that and I believe in myself that one day, the choices I make now, and the things that I do with passion, will find a better way for that. But until that day, I will be happy doing what I love, and it’s the only thing that matters in the present.
The future will always happen, and it is inevitable! So why spoil the surprise by planning the damn thing and letting that scheme decide your choices? Let the choices determine the course of your life. Once you start planning and try being a precognitive human, you will only be choosing the stuff that you need to pick and not the ones that you love to.
Make the choices you love while you can! Life may or may not fall in line, but you will figure out what you really love.