What to Do with Your Life When You Can't Find the Right Path
Do you feel lost? Do not know what to do with your life? Some people at times feel that the direction they’re heading in is totally meaningless.
In fact, no path they could choose seems to have meaning and they despair after countless failed attempts to make a change to take away that feeling. There’s no future, no goals, no objectives. They are lost.
Everyone, at some point, has been one of these people. We know what it’s like to feel like you’re at a dead-end. It feels like an emptiness inside: nothing outside, little inside.
While we may not want to recognize it, everything we’ve done up to this moment — our decisions, our way of living — has led us on this path that seems to have no way out.
An opportunity to find yourself again
When you don’t know what to do with your life, when you’ve come to a point where you can’t find a way out, it doesn’t matter how much anguish you feel how much you desire to get out. In that particular moment, none of that will do anything. There is something you have to do: find yourself again.
When did you start focusing on others and forgetting about yourself? At what point did you stop wondering what you really want to do? When did what you want to do with your life become your last priority?
The way we’re living puts us on autopilot and makes us act like robots, avoiding any awareness of the present.
Now that you’ve come to a dead-end where you don’t know what to do with your life, stop. It is the perfect time to become aware of yourself and what’s around you. Why? So you can reconnect with the world and also with yourself.
Your wants, your desires, what really motivates you will be there to point out the goals you have, but didn’t want to see for a long time because you strayed from the path.
You believe there is no way out, when actually the solution lies within you. The motivation comes from within, but for that you have to know what you want.
Deep down inside you know what the right path is. However, the time you spent living on autopilot has dimmed your instincts, making you to feel lost now.
It’s true that at first when you don’t know what to do, your reaction is to spin, kick, try to run like a runaway horse. But you have to reach the point where you realize you must stop in order to be aware of the things we mentioned earlier.
If you don’t know what to do with your life, start accepting reality
This is a very important step to be able to benefit from the above. However, you probably realize that accepting reality has been what got you to that dead end.
We usually live with different expectations about how things have to happen. I finish the race, I find a job, then the love of my life who I will have children with, and I will live a very happy life.
It seems perfect, right? The ideal many people aspire to. But … what if everything goes wrong?
The expectations that you may have don’t guarantee your life will turn out that way. Most likely, problems, difficulties, and adversities will arise that will make you frustrated and angry, and you will refuse to accept that what’s happening isn’t meeteing your expectations.
When we reach a point of great indecision, it may be time to talk to a professional. With them, we will discover whether it’s time to go back to where we got lost, or on the contrary, whether the solution lies in looking for different alternatives to get moving again.
Many times, the option we choose will depend on the price we’re willing to pay to reach one goal or another.
Some times are much more conducive than others for existential crises like these. Perhaps the first happens when we become an adult. We have to choose what we want to do as a career and how we want our life to be.
The second arises when we’re older, around 40, when the classic mid-life crisis occurs and it’s time to leave behind one period of our life to start anew.
Expectations sometimes prevent us from being flexible with the problems and difficulties that may arise in life.
Realizing you don’t know what to do with your life can be a good thing
In many times of change when we go from one season of our life to another, we may feel lost. This is natural and, in principle, doesn’t have to be scary.
However, if this happens, we must watch out for a feeling of restlessness leading to reckless abandon. These times of change are also times for intelligence and patience, to decide with our head. We will choose what we will choose, and there will be people who tell us that we’re making a mistake.
Whether you’re retracing your steps or looking for a new path, every situation has an exit. Sometimes logical and predictable, other times surprising, random and mysterious.
The first door is a good one, but the second, as we mentioned before, may have the most opportunities behind it. Discovering what to do with your life is an exciting journey.