A few days ago, a college student contacted me. He assumed I could give him advice because I sound wiser than I actually am. Naturally, I basked in the glory and expected my worldly experience to churn out pearls of wisdom to guide this lost soul towards the right path.

His problem was that with every new article he read, video he watched or piece of news he came across, his aim in life kept changing.

For example, he would read about an inspiring IAS officer and decide that he wanted to become an IAS officer. Then he would get inspired by the quality of the video itself and decide that he wanted to become a content creator. After reading a few articles, he now wanted to become a writer.

He expected advice about whether or not he was overthinking and if there was a way out.

Unfortunately, my first thought was: “Hey, I have the same problem. Do I know what to do?” This was an unfortunate discovery.

The problem with giving advice is that people assume you have solved the problem you are advising them about. Nobody wants to hear career advice from someone who still occasionally stares at job portals, wondering whether the corporate world is really their calling or whether they should abandon everything and open a bakery.

I thought about his problem. He wanted to do everything and nothing at the same time. This sounded ridiculous.

Then I realised most adults are doing the same thing.

We have become better at hiding it. We call the young person’s confusion a lack of direction. We call the older person’s confusion a career transition.

A college student changes his mind every week, and everyone worries about his future. An adult changes career every three years, and everyone calls him dynamic.

The real problem is not that young people have too many interests. The problem is that they have not yet learned the sophisticated adult technique of pretending to have one.

Not stopping at one

We tell young people to follow their passion as though passion is a GPS location. Just follow it. It will lead you somewhere. Nobody tells them that passion can behave like a toddler in a toy shop. Today, it wants to be a doctor. Tomorrow, it wants to be police. The day after that, it wants to be an animator. By Friday, it has watched three videos about artificial intelligence and wants to build a start-up. And then, after seeing a successful director talk about movies for two hours in the morning, it wants to be a filmmaker.

Perhaps what this student really needed was not advice but permission. Permission to not know. Permission to be interested in several things without immediately turning each interest into a career. Permission to admire someone’s life without assuming that you must live it. And perhaps, permission to try things and discover that he doesn’t actually like them.

Because that is how most of us figure things out. We don’t always discover what we want. Sometimes we eliminate what we don’t want. I didn’t tell him any of this immediately.

More confused

I felt slightly guilty that he had come to me expecting wisdom and had instead found another confused person.

Eventually, I replied. I told him that I didn’t think he was necessarily overthinking. He was curious. Curiosity was good. He didn’t have to turn every new interest into a lifelong commitment. I told him to try things. And then I stopped. I had run out of wisdom.

He thanked me. Maybe the advice helped. This was both gratifying and concerning. It meant that I had given useful advice despite not knowing what I was doing. Which may actually be the definition of adulthood. We grow older.

People assume we know what we’re doing. We begin giving advice. And somewhere between advising others to trust the process and follow their dreams, we realise that we are all just making it up. Some of us are more convincing. And some of us write articles about it. Which is apparently enough to make a young person believe we know what we’re talking about.

chanchalaborah9@gmail.com