The End of Confusion is An Illusion

I used to dream of the day I'd have it "all figured out." Nowadays I hear my students constantly speak of this magical land. "I can't wait to have it all figured out," they say. Or "When I have it all figured out, I'll..." Or "My friends have it all figured out."

All Figured Out is a beautiful oasis where you can recline on handwoven hammocks while warm, salty breezes tickle your hair; attractive masseuses knead your legs and feet; and decadent, sweet drinks ooze through every crevice of your mouth.

Life is good in All Figured Out. It's where we all aim to one day land. It's what we're all working for. It's the photo negative of our current complicated and confused lives, its very presence making us discontent with the here and now.

Thing is, it doesn't exist.

Oh wait, should I not be telling you this?

OK, then I WON'T tell you that at this very moment, squarely in my mid-thirties, I'm stressing over:

a) Which town to move to when we eventually get the guts to sell our house:  the dream town near the ocean that has intense schools and that we can't afford, or the practical inland town with solid schools that we can't really afford, either.

b) Whether to try to have another child. And how to afford said child's care and food and sundry needs, if he or she were to arrive.

c) How much time and energy to direct toward my teaching versus my paid freelance writing versus my unpaid writing (read: this blog). And how shifting said energy would affect heretofore specified Questions a and b.

Sound like I live in All Figured Out?

Yet if my twentysomething self had encountered me in the classroom - wow, that's a weird picture, to imagine me teaching me...I think I would've disliked myself from both directions! - I would've thought differently. "My prof has her career, she has her family, she has her home. She has it All Figured Out," I would've said wistfully to my friends. In fact, I did say that very thing about my Psych 101 prof. Many times. Until I got to know her when I was a senior. And I stopped saying it.

Sure, compared to having EVERYTHING up in the air the way it is in your twenties, my life is pretty settled. But it's not All Figured Out. And, with any luck, it never will be.

Yeats said, "Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."

Ah, yes, growth. How else to account for the fact that people sell their homes about 12 years after buying them, have seven careers in a lifetime, and end 40-50% of their marriages? We're not a static species. As much as we dream of All Figured Out, we don't actually want to get there.

Case in point:  how often do you do nothing? You want to do it a lot, right? You tell your friends all the time that you can't wait to "do nothing," don't you?

But what does "do nothing" consist of for you? Probably watching Netflix or YouTube or Hulu, hanging out on social media, chilling to some music. I sincerely doubt that "doing nothing" means literally "doing nothing." As in, sitting in a darkened room with only your thoughts to keep your company.

When a psych researcher paid people to do just that back in the 1950s (paid them double what they normally earned, no less!), most of the participants dropped out within a day. They couldn't take the boredom. Those who stayed became disoriented,

restless, and even complained of nausea (Bexton et al., 1954).

This is because we have stimulus motives, a basic need for novel stimulation. And we're not alone; other animals show signs of having stimulus motives, too.

In other words, when life gets too routine, we shake things up. It's a need, like eating or sleeping or having sex (you're not giggling, are you?!).

So have I now sufficiently freaked you out?

You are never going to make it to All Figured Out. You may vacation there once in a while. There may be a run of hours or day or weeks when you hang out on those handwoven hammocks. But mark my words, you'll want out. Badly.

Which you can either take as scary as hell - what they heck am I working toward then?!?!?! - or as a relief. Because if no one lives in All Figured Out, you can stop striving to be there and you can just simply be. As in, where you are right now. In the Land of Confusion.

If nothing else, you've got company there. Plenty of it.

This just might be All Figured Out (Photo credit: Edgar Barany)

Embrace Identity Discomfort

Here’s the dirty little secret about life:  To live well, you have to feel some pain. We’re a culture obsessed with pleasure. With maximizing good feelings and minimizing bad ones. With attaining the yin and not the yang (or is it the yang and not the yin?). Our fixation leaves us frustrated, unhappy, and lost. Especially in the career search.

If there’s one thing we know about forging an identity it’s that the process hurts. Sometimes a lot. And finding a career, if you do it right, is all about finding who you really are.

Yesterday a sophomore came into my office. She looked beat down and unsettled. She told me she’d been thinking a lot over winter break, debating whether her major and minor were right for her; questioning her assumption that her parents’ interests should dictate her own; wondering which of the thousands of careers available, if any, sounded even remotely worth pursuing for a lifetime.

When she finished, I said, “Congratulations. You’re doing the hard work. This is exactly what you should be doing right now – getting confused, feeling lost. I know it feels awful, but congratulations. You’re there.”

She looked at me like I had just named Lance Armstrong Ambassador of Honesty and Integrity.

She may have thought I was crazy but, man, I wish someone had said that to me ten years ago. I thought something was wrong with me for feeling like my student does now. Throughout college, grad school, and deep into my twenties, I had bouts of severe questioning about my path and my passions. It was uncomfortable – to put it mildly – to have no road map before me, and it felt like every time I allowed myself to really touch the questions - to grab them and stare at them and realize all that I did not know - the road before me only got blurrier instead of clearer. I was certain these were signs of depression. I was convinced I was on the cusp of mental breakdown.

Far from it.

Here’s what we know from developmental psych:  to attain an identity - a true, genuine sense of who you are – you have to go through a crisis. There’s no other way to get there. You can try to cheat your way to an identity by stealing someone else’s (e.g., a parent’s), but that doesn’t hold up in the long run. Eventually, at some juncture, you’re going to have to go through a period of actively questioning, of exploring options, of releasing paths that aren’t right for you. That process - and the very notion of "crisis" - get a bum wrap in our culture.

Instead of pushing back in my moments of bewilderment, instead of labeling myself and searching for a “cure,” I should have lived the questions. I should have embraced the fact that clarity comes just after the moment of peak confusion.

Crises are healthy, especially as a twentysomething,. They mean you are developing well.

With any luck, my student’s crisis is the first of many in her life. The people who are most fulfilled, who are living the truest and most complete version of their lives, forge an identity for a time and then, as their life circumstances and perspective change, let it all shake up again. And again. And again. Psychologists call this the MAMA cycle; we enter identity a crisis (called Moratorium) and then Achieve identity, over and over throughout our lives. If we’re doing life right.

In other words, we find meaning and purpose and our sources of flow – the bedrocks of lasting happiness and its plethora of positive correlates – only by sitting in the uncomfortable pit of questioning on a regular basis.

In short, if you want to avoid having a gratifying career, dodge discomfort at all costs. When the questions well up in you, shove them aside, take some antidepressants or alcohol or drugs to dull them, put on a confident show, pretend they’re simply not there. Your career search will end before it even begins.

But if you’re in life to live it, then live it. Crises and all. And congratulate yourself for feeling so damn uncomfortable.

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." – Rainer Maria Rilke

Yin Yang Candy (Photo credit: FadderUri)