Getting to Know Yourself

Life got complicated. Not in some abstract way, but in the sheer number of forks in the road a person faces now. Where you live, who you partner with, what you study, how you earn a living. Each of those used to be a settled question for most people, and today each one splits into a dozen more.

Think about how a life used to be mapped out. School, then a job or a business, a marriage, and you stayed put for roughly forty years until retirement arrived. The menu was short. You picked from two or three options and you walked that line. Deciding wasn't agonizing because there wasn't much to decide.

Compare that to a teenager now, expected to have some notion of a career before leaving high school so a guidance counselor can route them toward vocational training or college-prep coursework. The pressure to choose arrives early, and the choosing never really stops.

I suspect some of the rise in anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder tracks back to this. People grow unhappy with the decisions they've made and the ones they keep having to make. For some, the dissatisfaction hardens into a kind of paralysis that keeps them from working at all. Others carry it in their bodies instead, with stress and anxiety surfacing as physical illness. We strain to keep pace with a world that keeps getting more tangled, and the strain leaves marks.

You can hear the result in a single sentence people say all the time: "I hate my job." Whatever satisfaction a vocation is supposed to offer, those people aren't getting it. They've started wishing their weeks away, counting down to Wednesday, then to Friday, treating the middle of the week as something to survive. It's a strange way to live, speeding up your own days because so many of them feel unbearable. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, written off before they begin.

So how do you climb out of that? How do you stop working purely for the paycheck while stress and its physical and mental fallout pile up around you, in a world that keeps dangling what look like better lives just out of reach? The honest answer is slow and unglamorous: an actual self-assessment. A lot of people drift through decades because they never found themselves. They grabbed the first career handed to them and never questioned it.

Taking time to understand what you genuinely want matters more now than it used to. The old American phrasing names it directly: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit part assumes you know what you're pursuing.

Personal growth starts with a plain inventory. What are you good at? Where are your strengths, and which weaknesses stand between you and your goals? This doesn't need to become a drawn-out, elaborate project. How deep you go depends mostly on how badly you want a life rather than just a paycheck. So write it down. What do you actually want, and why do you want it?

Once your strengths and weak spots come into focus, certain kinds of work start looking more appealing than others, and you can see whether they'd require a degree or something beyond that. From there you go looking for a market that values what you can do, and for chances to build experience and the kind of confidence that lets you sell yourself.

The same gap, I'd argue, feeds the divorce rate. People want the house, the kids, the dog, the steady middle-class picture, but they marry and launch careers without ever having figured out who they are. Skip the self-knowledge and life becomes a long grind of making ends meet while the question of what you want goes permanently unanswered.

And if you're miserable at the place where you spend half your waking hours, you probably won't be happy elsewhere either. That spills into family life. You can't spend eight hours a day in something close to misery and then walk through your front door radiating joy. What you bring home instead is exhaustion mixed with relief, and relief at a day being over is not the same thing as peace, laughter, or a sense of fullness. Those come through some working combination of vocation, relationships, and the ongoing work on yourself.

Pull the pieces together. Sum up your self-assessment, figure out how much growth your goals actually demand, and name the areas where you're genuinely capable. Then hunt for a market that will hire someone with your skills, and learn to present yourself well. Dave Ramsey has said we're all in sales to one degree or another, and there's truth in that. Success tends to follow effort, and effort follows how much you care about the thing you're trying to build.

Knowing who you are is the heart of all of it. You need that footing before you can move forward anywhere else, including settling down and starting a family.

- Erwin Wooten