In 2023, I made a significant career change.
Looking back, I’m not entirely sure why I started my original career in the first place. Perhaps it was a backwards sort of logic. I wanted stability. I wanted a clear trajectory. More than anything, I wanted to avoid becoming one of those people in their twenties who seemed to have no clear job, goal, or life plan.
There is a particular kind of panic reserved for people in their twenties. It rarely arrives through catastrophe. Instead, it appears through LinkedIn announcements, engagement photos, productivity podcasts, and the dreaded question: “So, what’s next for you?”
I’ve heard that question many times. My family asks it. My friends ask it. For a long time, it felt as though everyone around me had an answer.
I didn’t lack interests. If anything, I had too many. I have always been the sort of person who sees possibilities everywhere. Later, I would start describing myself as a magpie: constantly distracted by the next shiny idea, the next fascinating path, the next thing I could imagine myself becoming.
The Myth of the Life Plan
Modern life treats uncertainty like a moral failure. Somewhere between school assemblies and graduate recruitment schemes, many of us absorbed the idea that adulthood should unfold like a railway timetable. Degree by twenty-one. Career by twenty-five. Marriage, mortgage, measurable success shortly after. Any deviation begins to feel like lateness.
The strange thing is that very few lives actually happen this way.
When you look backwards through history, most people did not possess a coherent five-year plan. Lives were shaped by accident, necessity, grief, war, opportunity, geography, luck. The polished modern narrative of linear self-actualisation is, in many ways, a fiction created by institutions that benefit from predictability.
And yet we internalise it deeply.
We speak about ourselves as though we are failed projects. People no longer say, “I’m figuring things out.” They say, “I’m behind.”
When I changed careers at twenty-three, I had many of the things I thought I wanted. I had savings. I had routine. I had financial stability. I had a regular job and a group of friends whose lives seemed similarly settled.
But they weren’t settled, and neither was I.
Now, at twenty-five, I feel comfortably unsettled. Relieved that I am not still trapped in a role that never quite felt right. I have different ambitions now, different ideas, and plans that are slowly developing into something that feels more like me.
Perhaps that is the uncomfortable reality of adulthood. Most people are not following a map. They are drawing one as they go.
The Magpie Problem
There is something profoundly performative about the modern life plan. Social media has transformed private uncertainty into public comparison. Every milestone becomes visible. Careers are announced like football transfers. Relationships become brands. Even hobbies are monetised before they are enjoyed.
Take Wellington Treads. I genuinely love it, and I have worked hard to build it. But I would be lying if I said I never thought about what it represents.
It is not simply a website, but evidence. A public record that I care about something and have direction. That I am building towards something meaningful. Perhaps that is another modern pressure; we no longer simply enjoy our interests. We document them, curate them, display them. Even our passions become credentials.
I do not think that is why I created Wellington Treads, but I would be pretending if I claimed the thought never crossed my mind.
Whenever people ask me what I want to do with my life, I often tell them that I am like a magpie. Not because I have no interests, but because I find almost everything interesting.
At the risk of extending the bird metaphor too far, I constantly worry about pigeonholing myself into one career path and missing opportunities that I might genuinely love. While some people struggle because they have no idea what they want, others struggle because they can imagine too many versions of themselves.
Having a life plan offers a kind of security that I genuinely envy.
But the magpie is not free in their abundance of choice. Choice can become paralysis.
You begin to fear making the wrong decision so intensely that you stop making meaningful decisions altogether. We are encouraged to optimise every choice as though human lives can be reduced to efficiency models. Yet many of the most meaningful experiences arrive through apparent detours. The wrong job teaches you what matters. The abandoned degree redirects your intellectual interests. The temporary move becomes a permanent home.
For a long time, I assumed that people with clear career paths were spared this uncertainty.
I was wrong.
The Specialist’s Trap
One of my closest friends completed a Master’s degree in paediatric nursing. She spent years working towards a respected profession with a clear structure and obvious progression. It seemed like exactly the sort of career that should provide certainty.
Then, one day, she called me and confessed that she was questioning everything.
She was not sure whether she wanted to remain a nurse. She was not sure whether she wanted to stay in healthcare at all. She worried that she was wasting her education, the years of effort she had invested, and the identity she had built around a decision made when she was still a teenager.
The life plan she had felt pressured to create so early had become the bars of a prison.
What struck me most was not that she felt uncertain. It was that she felt guilty for feeling uncertain.
As though questioning a decision was somehow evidence that the original decision had been wrong. As though changing direction would invalidate years of hard work.
But had she really built that prison herself?
How much responsibility belongs to the individual, and how much belongs to a culture that treats certainty as a virtue? We encourage young people to make enormous decisions at astonishingly young ages. We ask teenagers to map out entire futures before they have had the opportunity to experience very much of life at all.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to my nephew.
At four years old, he is blissfully unconcerned with careers, professional identity, or five-year plans. He wants puzzles, toy cars, and whatever has captured his attention that particular afternoon.
Yet adults are already asking him what he wants to be when he grows up.
The question sounds harmless because it usually is. But it also carries an assumption that adulthood is something you choose in advance, rather than something you gradually discover.
Maybe the pressure to have a life plan begins far earlier than we realise. Not with university applications or job interviews, but with the quiet expectation that a good life should always be heading somewhere specific.
Some of the most fulfilled people I have met are not those with rigid plans, but those with adaptable identities. People who can change direction without viewing themselves as failures. People who can pursue new interests without feeling as though they are betraying old ones.
Perhaps the real pressure is not to have a life plan, but to appear convincing while improvising one.
And maybe adulthood is less about certainty than about learning how to tolerate uncertainty without seeing yourself as unfinished.