The sensation of not knowing the next step in life, feeling lost
Scott Berkun writes about feeling lost after graduating from college:
For years I’d been following the plan given to me: go to high school, go to college, get a job. From day one of kindergarten onward there was always a next step waiting. The choices were easy and safe: which classes, which activities, which universities. But an hour after my college graduation, sitting alone in an empty apartment on Beeler street in Pittsburgh, there were no more choices laid out for me. There was nothing. I confronted my future as a kind of void for the first time and was terrified. I’d never understood that emptiness, despite seeing its effect on older friends and my older brother. Until I was sitting alone surrounded by it, without the defense of a plan or a friend, I had no idea how frightening it was.
I was always the opposite. I tended to be unrealistically optimistic about the stuff I wanted to do. I never had a single moment when I was unsure of what I should be doing, for me, the problem has always been finding money so I could go do those things. What to do has always been an easy question for me, how to do it has been much tougher.