I want to strive, to fail, to get up again, to fight with all my might against the obstacles set before me, to achieve my dream in life. I want to get up early, to do the hard things others aren't willing to do, to self-actualize, to become who I was meant to be.
The problem is I don't have anything I want like that. I feel okay in my life. I have goals, I work toward them, I'm in decent shape. I love my wife and kid, and my job is pretty good. But I can't say any of these things are my overarching passion (except my son, and maybe my wife). They don't light a fire within me. I don't feel particularly alive or on fire to go to my job. I enjoy my hobbies but they don't typically make me feel transcendent. My friend group is a decent size, but very surface level and ultimately missing some kind of intimacy that I don't know how to have with male friends.
So what do I do? How do I grow if I don't have a clear direction to grow in? I have things that I want and ways to improve, but I feel like I'm not really putting myself out there. I want to aspire to greatness. I want to be daring, and to feel alive. I feel like I must be a boring person. I don't know what else do to other than continue to advance in my fairly typical 9-5 career... but when I'm on my deathbed, I doubt I'll be particularly proud and content with being a senior engineer. But how do I find what I want? How do I find my vision? How am I supposed to follow my dreams when I don't know what they are? Is something wrong with me?
I'm not discounting your feelings or situation, but dude... you're twenty-eight years old! The first 18 or so, you lived your life according to other people's rules, standards, and goals. Then you went to college (probably) for 4 years or so (probably), so you have had six whole years of being a real person. Cut yourself some slack, man! :-) I'm 20 years ahead of you, don't know you from Adam, and don't know anything about your situation beyond what you have posted here. So I am totally qualified to give you advice! So here we go... What I see in your post is someone who isn't comfortable with himself. You aren't connected to YOU. You haven't spent a lot of time alone. You haven't done a lot of introspection. You don't really know what your internal drivers are. At 28 I was ending my first marriage, working a high-paying job in the tech industry, riding my motorcycle to work every day, living in the Haight-Ashbury, and kind of a wild man. My life was full of noise and action and activity and busy-ness. It took me about 10 more years to slow down enough and let the dust settle enough to realized that I was afraid of being alone. I had no identity outside of the work I did. I could not just sit alone and read a book, or be quiet, or just sit in the forest and stare at trees. I had to be DOING SOMETHING to always keep me distracted from the fact that I didn't really have an identity. I didn't know who I was. Therefore, I didn't know what value I could be to someone else, and that made me a bad partner in a long string of short relationships. Lots of frustrated women who could see my potential, but couldn't help me get comfortable with myself... so I'd eventually slip away. My Advice: Here's what I suggest: Sign up for a yoga class, and commit to doing it for 6 months. Sounds weird, I know. But you are young and fit. The best way to remain in shape, and in tune, is to do yoga regularly. It helps you keep flexible (and you have NO IDEA how important this is going to be later on in life!!!), it keeps a strong core, it helps you find physical and mental balance, it gives you some quiet time to be alone with yourself and your muscles and your body, and it mellows you out. You can also do it anywhere, at any time, for stress relief, or stretching getting off a long plane flight, or whatever. Yoga is magic and everyone should do it. By doing yoga, you will be focusing on yourself in a healthy way, spending quiet time alone in your head without family or digital distractions, and you will get to lean more about your physical self, as well as your cerebral self. When your mind has time, permission, and space, to wander... you never know what you might find in there! Yoga is also a community. A healthy community that cares about each other. And hugs one another. And shares honest feelings. These are things you are missing, as well. It's not a cure-all panacea, or anything like that. But I think it might help someone in exactly your situation... and lead to long-term health benefits that you will be VERY grateful for later in life!
Unless you make the mistake of signing up for hot yoga, in which case it means breathing in the smell of people who don't wash their clothes enough while listening to Whitesnake for an hour.Sign up for a yoga class, and commit to doing it for 6 months. Sounds weird, I know. But you are young and fit. The best way to remain in shape, and in tune, is to do yoga regularly. It helps you keep flexible (and you have NO IDEA how important this is going to be later on in life!!!), it keeps a strong core, it helps you find physical and mental balance, it gives you some quiet time to be alone with yourself and your muscles and your body, and it mellows you out.
Mis-read that as Whitehouse at first and suddenly wanted to do yoga.
Invite 30 people to a rustic barn setting, they set up their mats and chit chat. Fit bodies and water bottles. Suddenly a pulsing and staccato kick drum blares from overhead. the doors behind them slam shut. A sweaty man lights a hay fire in the middle of the room. megaphone squaks unbearably He paces back forth, pushing up his dad glasses. "ASSUME THE LOTUS POSITION" "SERENITY IS A LIE. SERENITY IS A LIE. SERENITY IS A LIE HOLD FOR THE NEXT 30 SECONDS AND DONT FORGET TO CHOKE." "YOU IN THE THIRD ROW GET LOWER! THIS IS WHY YOU NEVER BECAME A DANCER!!"
I'm sold. Especially on the part where yoga is a community. I've never heard that before. And the flexibility being important in my later years is something I'm probably neglecting. I am now stronger than almost anyone who doesn't strength train, but I'm about as flexible as a dead branch.
I was wrestling with this question a few years ago after tangling with depression for a couple months and nearly attempting suicide. When I came out the other side, I was struck by how thin the barrier between my existing and not existing became for a while there. It occurred to me that all the pain I felt, all my suffering, wouldn't have been a blip on the universe's radar. I realized that my individual life was very small, and that there were many others like it. I felt this sickening surge of meaninglessness. Individual glory and self-aggrandizing seemed pathetic before an overpowering wave of anonymity. What was the point of trying to achieve, why should I struggle and strive, if eventually all I am and was would be subsumed and worn away by a dull gray sea of fellow humanity? Well, that kind of thinking would just get me back to suicide again. Eventually I decided that effort, pain and struggle was worth it if it was directed at lifting the whole rest of the sea up with me. I decided that resisting my commonality with my fellow humans was a lie, and that true meaning lay in embracing it. To get to the point: If you want a direction to grow in, look to other people. If you want transcendency, go care for a stranger. If you want meaningful connections, then give a shit without a thought for yourself. If you want pride, or greatness, find it in well-earned gratitude. If you want to feel alive, to be daring, to not be boring, take all of the above and go do it where the need is greatest and the challenges are largest. Pardon the dramatics, this truly is what lends meaning to my life and I'm more than a little passionate about it. If it sounds like it might fit you, then go give it a try. Not sure what kind of engineer you are, but I've heard that Engineers Without Borders does good work.
Here's the thing. You can be passionate about a goal. You can set it as your prime life focus. You can intend to "achieve your dream in life." But unless you're a sociopath, you're going to need to be invested with others. It's much easier for a team to be gung-ho about something than an individual. And if you aren't gung-ho about your team, you're not going to be gung-ho about anything that team does. Passion is a sharing thing. If you don't have anyone to share with, you're going to have a hard time building it. Work on that and the rest will follow - you may even find yourself being deeply invested in someone else's passion.
I do feel unsatisfied with the level of sharing with the people I currently socialize with. I also often feel lonely, even when I'm with friends. Besides my wife I don't think there is anyone I know who is even interested in building a truly intimate friendship with me. So how do I find my tribe as a 28 year old man? How do I make real intimate friendships? Maybe that is my real obstacle right now.
Ain't that always the question. 1) Volunteer. 2) Go to church. 3) Join a club. 4) Continuing ed. 5) Sports organizations. 6) Hobby organizations. I tell you what - you spend time at a soup kitchen, a unitarian church, the Freemasons, a cooking class, a climbing club and a model airplane flight chapter and you will be anything but solitary. That's different from not feeling isolated - and you should never conflate the two - but you will have had ample opportunities to find and bond. I also recommend having children. You will find yourself forced to spend time with parents you never would associate with otherwise, and you might even enjoy it.
You're old enough to have a wife and kid and you don't yet have a life's work or any idea what that might be. You're ordinary and that can be hard to accept. Just be the best father and husband you can be. There's nothing wrong with the reality of ordinary greatness. I have overarching life goals that may be attainable but I'll probably die alone of liver disease even if I achieve them so who's coming out on top in that comparison? The guy who lived a life filled with love or the one with a singular drive to do something that can be called vision? Go take your kid to Chili's tonight and buy him fried ice cream.
I can't speak for everyone but I think most people feel like this. I'm not old enough or experienced enough to tell you if you should rattle the cage or stay the course. I've been wondering a lot myself if I'll be in your same shoes 5, 10, or 20 years from now, since I've officially begun life as a professional. I was sure this was the direction I wanted to go but now I'm wondering if I'm going to feel fulfilled where I am, or if I should have tried pursuing something bolder and more punishing like academia. I felt very weary and disenchanted with it as a student though. I once saw a professor talking in a candid setting for a roast in his honor, for his distinguished contributions. He said it was strange to him to be recognized by the group since he considered himself a failure. He talked about how his career had been marked by a succession of disappointments. So I'll watch this post and the replies eagerly. I don't know if any of this helps you, but I think you're not alone.
That's interesting what you say about the professor. A good friend of mine turned down academia after becoming disillusioned of it's tribal/in-out group/club-ness, yet still wished she had accepted at other times. That's one of the frustrating things about life, you only get one and every door entered is a multitude of doors closed.
I have this issue, I started therapy and I think it's helping. I think a part of it was not being encouraged as a kid to try new things while also being discouraged a lot. If every time a kid is excited or passionate about something that passion is met with indifference or pessimism I'm pretty sure they internalize that shit. At least I think I did.
Speaking from my own experience, therapy has merits in its ability to bring about awareness of my own way of thinking in life and how I came to think that way. While it's valuable information to understand where it began and how it's affected my life since, I've yet to see any deliverable come out of doing therapeutic work as a result. I'm curious to know, in what ways do you see therapy helping in such a broad issue, in your experience?
For me it helps me notice those thought patterns in day to day life and understand them so I can understand they are unhealthy and I should go the opposite route. For example I have an irrational fear of being ridiculed or belittled so whenever I feel myself pulling away from a social situation I can remind myself that I'm not doing that for any logical reason so I can change the behaviour. I've got another friend who gets anxious in social settings, understanding the problem helps him understand the anxiety comes from his past not his present so he should do the opposite of what his anxiety tells him in order to be happy.