I Don’t Know What to Do With My Life: How to Find Your Next Step

You pull up a job posting and attempt to picture the kind of person who would actually want that position. Then you browse a course. Then apartments in a different city. Sixty minutes later, twelve tabs are open and you’re no closer to knowing what you want.

Making a choice is difficult when every option has to account for how the rest of your life will unfold. You think about teaching, and right away you picture being 45 and still in the classroom. You glance at a new city and ask yourself whether being there would change anything. Meanwhile, someone wants to know your plan, and you contemplate hurling your laptop into the sea.

In How Did I End Up Here Again?, I described the Life Loop: The Search, The Calling, The Work, and The Conclusion. The Search is the opening movement, the period when we’re hunting for a direction and still haven’t found one. We keep cycling back to it throughout our lives, sometimes even when everything else is going fine.

That’s not an easy place to sit. Particularly when you believe you should have moved on ages ago. What tends to help is finding something concrete to do with the uncertainty. A next step can teach you a bit more about what you want, even while you’re not ready to choose a direction.

What, specifically, do you want to change?

“I don’t know what to do with my life” can contain an awful lot.

Maybe you dislike your job. Maybe you like it well enough, but you spend every evening just recovering from the day. Perhaps you followed the path your parents hoped for and now struggle to find your own view on it.

Or maybe something genuinely draws your interest. Enough that attempting it and learning you’re not good at it would sting. There are advantages to keeping it in the category of “something I might do one day”.

Before searching for a new direction, try finishing this sentence:

The part of my life I most want to change is…

Make the answer concrete enough that another person could picture what you mean. “I want to stop spending Sunday evening worrying about Monday.” Or “I miss having people to make things with.” Those answers would send you exploring quite different changes.

Imagine you work in operations and keep returning to the idea of becoming a teacher. Your current job pays decently. You’re good at what you do. Yet you also spend an extraordinary amount of time updating documents that no one seems to read.

Teaching looks appealing because you picture yourself doing something useful for someone else and watching them actually get it.

That’s worth investigating. How much do you actually enjoy explaining ideas? Would having more of that in your current job make a difference? What about all the other parts of teaching?

Then there are the practical concerns. Rent still has to be paid while you sort this out. You might have kids, little energy, or almost no free time. Whatever step you take next has to fit the life you’re responsible for right now.

Look at what you already know about yourself

Recall a handful of times when you liked what you were doing enough to wish for more of it. These moments can be ordinary, such as showing a coworker how to do something, or cooking with friends and noticing you’d barely touched your phone all evening.

What were you enjoying about those moments?

For the hypothetical operations person, maybe it was training the new employee. There was a concrete problem, a person who needed support, and a satisfying moment when the explanation clicked. They stayed twenty extra minutes simply because they wanted to complete it.

That experience communicates something more precise than “I want meaningful work.” It indicates they like helping someone understand a practical issue. Teaching is one possibility worth exploring. Training coworkers could be another.

The things you dislike are worth some attention as well. If you’ve switched jobs twice and ended up unhappy in exactly the same way, try to describe what came with you. Maybe you kept taking positions that expected you to be available around the clock. What would you ask about before accepting another one?

After I left Google to work on my own, I eventually caught myself staying up late for a customer deadline. I had gained the freedom to work from anywhere, but I brought an old working pattern with me. It took time before I stopped to ask whether the life I was constructing was one I actually wanted to keep living.

Give one possibility an honest trial

Research can clarify what a given change would demand. But eventually you’ll need direct experience of the thing itself.

An aspiring teacher could ask someone already in the profession what a typical working week looks like, including the parts that rarely show up in a recruitment brochure. They could find an appropriate opportunity to assist with a beginner’s class for adults or offer a brief training session at their own job.

Each of these experiences answers a different question. If you enjoy a workshop, that’s a reason to keep investigating. There would still be plenty to learn about teaching as an actual job.

Pick something small enough to organize, yet close enough to the possibility to teach you something. If design intrigues you, offer to create a poster for a friend’s event and then revise it based on their feedback. Notice how it feels to make something that has to satisfy someone else’s requirements.

If you miss playing music, find an evening when you can play with other people. You can decide later whether you’d like to repeat it. The question of going professional as a musician can stay unanswered a while longer.

Before you try something, write down what you’re hoping to find out. For the teaching example, it might be:

Do I enjoy helping someone learn when it takes longer than I expected?

Then turn the next step into something concrete. “Explore teaching” could fill the rest of the year. “Ask the person who runs Thursday’s workshop whether I can help at a future session” gives you something you can actually carry out.

Notice what happened before deciding what it means

Suppose you do help at the workshop. At first, you’re nervous. One explanation lands badly, and you spend the trip home replaying it. But there was also someone who had been struggling, tried your suggestion, and looked delighted when it worked.

Would you go back?

It’s worth giving that question a little room. New situations can feel awkward. The work itself might also turn out to include things you don’t like. Describe what happened before you issue a verdict on whether you’re suited to it at all.

Jot down a few sentences while the details are still fresh. Maybe you loved explaining an idea to one person but found managing the whole room exhausting. A smaller group might be worth another try. Or perhaps you spent the entire evening wishing you were back home. That deserves attention as well.

You can choose to try again, adjust the setting, or set that possibility aside. Any of those leaves you with more to work from than you had back when you were reading course descriptions.

And sometimes an interest can occupy a perfectly good place in your life without turning into your income. Helping at a workshop once a month might be enough to create space for something you’ve been missing.

Keep the conversation going

The tricky part is holding onto all of this when the question resurfaces.

A few weeks later, you might write off the workshop because it didn’t produce a new career. Or you might find yourself considering another job with the very same demands you had wanted to escape. Having a place to revisit what you hoped would change and what you learned when you tried helps.

That’s part of the reason I’m building Hazel. She’s an AI you can talk to about your life, someone who helps you connect the dots and decide what to try next.

You can bring the uncertainty exactly as it is. Talk through the job you’re tired of, the possibility you keep circling back to, or why every option you consider feels wrong. Hazel can help you explore what matters in that situation and locate a step worth trying. When you return with what actually happened, she has more of your experience to work with.

If you’re in The Search at the moment, talk it through with Hazel. “I don’t know what to do with my life” is enough to begin the conversation.