Choosing a Life Before It Chooses You

What bothers me about the usual career path is how far you can travel along it before anyone asks whether you wanted to go there.

Go to school. Get a degree. Find a good job. Work for decades. Eventually, if things go well, you have enough security to spend your time as you please. Each step can make sense on its own. Taken together, they can make your actual life feel like something you're preparing for indefinitely.

I understand the attraction of a clear route. I also find it unsettling. By the time you have completed all the preparations, how much of your life have you spent waiting to begin?

I'm seeing this in a decision I may have to make soon. After graduation, do I begin working and pursue a graduate business degree at the same time, or do I work for a while and leave the degree for later? I'm considering an MBA and other possible graduate routes. I haven't settled on the program or the timing.

Staying at my current university has an appeal. I wonder whether continuing while I'm already here could make the transition easier. I am still trying to understand the admission options. Another university could give me a new experience, which I want too. But either way, combining graduate study with the first year of a job could stretch me thin.

The social part worries me. I don't want to underestimate what it would mean to graduate, start working, and have most of the remaining time taken up by another degree. I want friendships and a life outside the things that advance my career. Those take attention too.

Waiting has a cost in my mind as well. I worry that going back later could be harder, even if work is going well. It makes the decision difficult: doing more now could crowd out the first year after graduation; postponing it could leave me worrying about when I will return.

If I receive a return offer from a company I've worked with, I want to earn well and make something of the opportunity. I can imagine spending a few years there. I also want to move on eventually, go somewhere new, and have another experience. I don't see that possibility as a place I necessarily want to remain forever.

These are ordinary options, but choosing among them doesn't feel simple. Each one could give me something I want. Each one would also take time and attention away from something else I want. It is easy to talk about choosing my own life until I have to decide which parts of it get the next few years.

There is a larger ambition behind these decisions too. I study business management, but I want to find out whether I can build a business. I want to try something that has consequences outside a classroom, including the possibility that it fails. I haven't yet worked out how that ambition fits with the job and education decisions directly in front of me.

There is a kind of uncertainty in starting something that I actually want. I would have to discover what I don't know and respond to it. That can be painful, but at least there is something real to work with. The question is how to make room for that kind of attempt while also making practical decisions about the next stage of my life.

What I want is some evidence that I can take responsibility for an idea and carry it into the world. That matters to me more than arriving at a respectable position by the expected age. I would rather learn something substantial from an attempt that failed than never make an attempt of my own.

I admire people who set unusually high standards for their work. I see it in filmmaking and engineering, in people who seem unable to leave a problem alone because they care so much about getting it right. I want that kind of involvement. I don't want my main relationship with work to be counting how many years remain before I can stop.

I want to do work that changes something in a substantial way. That is part of what makes a comfortable, predictable future feel insufficient to me. I could follow the path available to me and still be left wondering what I might have accomplished if I had expected more of myself.

The appeal of freedom, for me, is the possibility of making those decisions while my life is happening. I don't want to postpone them until after I've fulfilled every expectation attached to my age, education, or background.

I don't yet know what that requires of me. Wanting to attempt something difficult and being able to carry it through are different things. That gap is what I want to find out about. Right now, it shows up in a fairly ordinary decision about work and another degree. I want to understand what I am choosing, what I am postponing, and what I am making room to try.