The past few weeks I’ve been hearing this question a lot in career coaching conversations: “Am I where I should be?”
It’s asked rhetorically of course, but I’ve heard it from college juniors and recent graduates and middle aged professionals and even a few entrepreneurs who have earned their way into early retirement…the lot of them wondering am I where I should be?
This question sits in the same place in my mind as “what should I do with my life?” Each question carries some discomfort with it about where we happen to be and what we happen to be doing with our lives. The implication of course is that there is something unsatisfactory, or wrong, with where we are. Or perhaps that we could have done something, or arrived somewhere, better.
I’ve said before (and will say again), the word “should” piques my interest here.
Should asserts a certain duty or correctness, typically in a critical way. Which is to say, when I hear someone ask these questions, I also hear them thinking: a) there is a correct answer, b) for some reason I haven’t figured it out yet (but everyone else has), and c) getting the answer wrong is representative of a kind of inadequacy or moral failing.
In effect, this is us attending to what Adam Phillips calls our “unlived lives.” Flirting with, considering, pondering the “lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.”
By floating off into our fond subjunctives (“I coulda, woulda, shoulda…”) we let our imaginations paper over some present discomfort we’re feeling about things as they are. And it may not be that those things are bad, but just the pesky reality that what we think would bring us peace of mind, what we think will usher in a feeling of legitimacy or of having “arrived,” may only do so for a moment, if at all.
But, as the poet Randall Jarrell says, “the ways we miss our lives are life.”
Which is to say, that tendency to float off into other possible iterations of yourself may simply be a feature of being human - an existential given.
In his excellent book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman quotes the Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz:
“There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship] or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about…The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of [person] is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the unique human that one is.”
Burkeman suggests that the solution here, such as it is, is to let our illusions die and rest in our finitude. To accept that we will always have more we want to do than we actually have time for, and “that [we] can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at [our] preferred speed, and that no experience […] can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well.”
The more you focus on that fact, the better able you are to focus your limited time and attention on the things that truly matter to you. That doesn’t mean you have to simply accept circumstances as they are, or that you can’t use your imagining to shape your actions in the present to achieve (hopefully) different outcomes in the future.
And, as Burkeman says, it’s not an argument against taking on large-scale, long-term endeavors, so much as an argument for recognizing that even grand endeavors “only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition.”
Said another way, are you where you should be? Of course you are, it’s the only place you can be.