Permission to wander
Oscar wild once said, “If you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment” which has always stood out to me because many of us tend to feel bad about our “not knowing”. Just this afternoon a friend of mine who has accomplished a number of things in his life was expressing his dissatisfaction and guilt about being nearly 24, not having his career fully planned or a serious romantic partner. Which is like… absurd. I read a quote somewhere on the internet that went something like “if you’re 23 you’re basically a 3 year old adult” and I really appreciate that perspective because the older you get and the closer you get to the “adults” in your life you start to realize absolutely nobody has their shit together. I mean really, we are all doing this life thing for the first time.
I mean, in the states it’s baked into our education system, our societal expectations, the way adults converse with young people, etc. I took my first career aptitude test in like 4th or 5th grade which again… absurd. It’s like someone decided one day while having a conversation with a teenager, “oh okay so you are capable of conscious thoughts? cool so how are you going to start pulling your own weight” - The very capitalist idea that our purpose in life is to work and contribute to the economy, completely forgoing the rest of what life has to offer is such a typical American way of existing that has become even more glaringly obvious to me the longer I spend traveling and experiencing other cultures and communities around the world.
It was always “so what career field interests you” and never, “what inspires you? what do you enjoy most about life? what do you hope to experience”.
Life tends to exist in the spaces between clarity and ambiguity. Yet, the pressure to live a life of absolute certainty—to chart a course so exact it tolerates almost no deviation—looms heavily over so many of us. There is a strange contradiction in how society views youth: celebrated as a time of boundless potential, yet confined by an insistence for immediate answers.
I often wonder where this expectation comes from, this notion that by the edge of eighteen, we should know the shape and direction of our lifetime. Perhaps it’s rooted in the human desire for order, for predictability and stability. But what is lost in this chase for precision? When did life become a series of milestones to tick off, rather than a series of opportunities and experiences to live and grow through?
To demand a complete and absolute vision of the future from really anyone but especially young people is not only unreasonable—it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of growth I think. We’re taught that the act of becoming is linear, a predictable ascent. But if I’ve learned anything via my experiences trying, failing, and learning from people all over the world, its that real development is neither a ladder nor a straight path; it is more akin to a spiral, revisiting old ideas with new perspectives, wandering through the unknown with only glimpses of understanding that coalesce slowly, when you squint and stand back a bit.
Looking back on the last few years as I have been lucky enough to experience such vast amounts of life. It’s really quite obvious to me that the most meaningful journeys are often those that are punctuated by or even inspired by detours. It’s the stories that unexpectedly land me on a random ferry boat in Costa Rica in the middle of the night or an unplanned country added to my itinerary the night before departing that leave the deepest impressions, not because they were part of some grand, premeditated design, but because they were literally not. The expectation that anyone should possess a fully articulated vision of their lives overlooks the essence of what it means to be alive: to experience, to question, to evolve.
I’m reminded of philosophers who believed that true wisdom comes not from knowledge but from the acknowledgment of one’s own ignorance. To say, “I have no idea where we are going” is not a failure; it’s the beginning of an authentic search. After all my guy Mr.Wilde also said “experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes“ And yet, there is a quiet violence in the way we push for answers, labeling hesitation as weakness when, in truth, it is the foundation from which most of life’s most genuine, meaningful growth and experience is derived.
Consider this: if the purpose of youth is to explore, to challenge and reshape one’s understanding of the world, then shouldn’t we be encouraged to linger in uncertainty? The experiences we gather while lingering in uncertainty —the mundane, the profound, the exciting, and the heartbreaking—are the pieces with which we eventually define ourselves.
There is a false dichotomy that permeates our culture: that not knowing is synonymous with being a failure, that exploration without immediate purpose is inherently wasteful. But the reality is more nuanced. The most transformative experiences are rarely efficient; they are the meandering conversations with strangers met in hostels that become instant best friends, the cities explored without a map or gps, the random books picked up in airbnb libraries and even the little sentiments about life we hear online. They are what fills the space between who we are and who we might become.
So while I sit here sorta digital nomad-ing without much of a plan for how long I will stay or where I will go next, listening to my young, incredibly smart and accomplished friend stress about not having his shit fully figured out right this minute at the ripe age of 23.7. I am consciously choosing to reject the weight of definitive answers.
I am choosing instead to embrace the tension of becoming, to see life not as a puzzle with fixed pieces but as a work constantly becoming. And perhaps that’s all the certainty we truly need: the permission to wander.
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MS
