How Are We Supposed to Plan a Future Like This?

on gawd

Is Anyone Okay Right Now?

…didn’t think so, but I still keep feeling like I’m falling behind.

Not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet way. In a “scrolling at midnight, everyone else building something concrete” kind of way. Careers accelerating. Opportunities multiplying. Five-year plans spoken out loud with confidence.

And I’m sitting here thinking: how are we supposed to plan a future like this?

Yesterday I woke up to a 4 a.m. text from my dad: “Mi hija, I don’t want you to work at a restaurant forever. No, no and no.” Not that I was planning on it, but also life is hard, and also I’m just a girl, fuck you, LOLOLOL. Somehow that felt like exactly the tension of my entire existence. Parental expectations, real-world pressure, and my own brain screaming about how little I actually know what comes next.

The world feels loud. Every week there’s another headline that makes everything feel unstable. Wars unfolding, powerful people exposed in ways that confirm the worst suspicions, institutions that once felt permanent now feeling fragile. It is not just one thing. It is the accumulation. The constant hum of crisis.

And underneath that noise, I’m supposed to decide what to do with my fucking life?!

bruh

I moved from Wisconsin to Colorado thinking the instability would be geographic. New altitude. New roads. New routines. I expected homesickness. I didn’t expect this deeper disorientation, this sense that time is moving forward and I don’t know what I’m building toward. I've spent hours crying and venting to my friends Alyssa and Aalyah about how much this move is affecting me. Oh great here come the waterworks as I'm typing this from the library!!!

I am twenty-five and I still say when I grow up I want to be something I can barely imagine. A physicist. An engineer. A bookstore owner. A piercer. A shelter advocate. Sometimes I feel like I am scribbling dreams in the margins of a life I am still trying to survive. I forget that I am literally the first in my lineage to have this freedom. I am the first to choose, the first to stumble, the first to wonder if choosing means anything at all. I am still learning what it means to be unbound in a world that often feels determined to keep me tethered. They see a life I am trying to contain but they cannot see the orbit of all my invisible possibilities. I am trying to survive and I am trying to figure it out and those things do not always fit neatly together but maybe they never were meant to.

In physics, a system is stable when the forces acting on it are balanced. Stability does not mean stillness. It just means nothing is accelerating. I feel like I am accelerating and standing still at the same time. The days move. The calendar flips. I work. I show up. I advocate. I function. On paper, it looks like motion. But internally, I feel suspended. Like I missed a memo about what comes next.

There is a cultural expectation that by a certain age, you are supposed to have chosen your orbit. Graduate school or promotion. Marriage or mortgage. Something solid enough to point at and say: that. That is the direction.

But what if the environment itself feels unstable?

In physics, when systems are under constant external stress, they behave differently. Noise increases. Small disturbances create disproportionate reactions. Predictability decreases. That is not failure of the system. That is response to conditions.

Maybe we are not individually malfunctioning. Maybe, just maybe, we are responding normally to abnormal levels of input...

It is hard to separate personal anxiety from collective anxiety right now. Is this my existential crisis, or the weight of living in a time where everything feels uncertain? When corruption is expected. When conflict feels permanent. When the future feels less like a promise and more like a question mark.

I do not want to write this from the other side. I do not have a neat resolution. I do not have a pivot story or a revelation about purpose. I have a lot of fucking crying. A lot of overthinking. A lot of wondering if I should be doing more, achieving more, deciding faster.

And there is something about time that makes it worse.

Physics gives us the concept of entropy. Disorder increases and time moves forward in one direction. There are no rewinds. No cosmic reset. The arrow only goes forward. That is what keeps me up at night. Not just that I do not know what I am doing, but that I do not know what I am doing while time keeps moving.

me rn

How are we supposed to choose a path when the ground feels like it is shifting? How are we supposed to commit to a long-term vision when the world itself feels provisional?

Sometimes I wonder if the pressure to have it figured out is a relic of a more stable era. When institutions lasted. When systems felt predictable. When building a life followed clearer equations. Now everything feels nonlinear. Careers pivot. Industries collapse. Information contradicts itself daily.

Maybe it makes sense that clarity feels harder to access.

I do not think the answer is to stop caring. I care deeply about how I spend my time. That is part of the problem. I do not want to drift. I do not want to look up in ten years and feel like I floated through a decade waiting for certainty.

But maybe certainty is not coming.

Maybe this is what it means to build a life in an unstable system. You choose anyway. You move anyway. Not because you are sure. But because motion is the only way forward.

In physics, movement happens when forces are unbalanced. Nothing changes without tension. Maybe this constant internal tension is not proof that I am failing. Maybe it is proof that I am being acted upon. By the world, by expectations, by time, by my own desire to matter.

I do not know what I am supposed to do next.

I do not know if I am behind or exactly where I am meant to be.

I do not know how to plan a five-year future when the next five months feel unpredictable.

But I do know this: feeling uncertain in an uncertain world might be the most honest response available to me.

And maybe honesty, not certainty, is the more stable place to start.

♡♡♡

thank u for reading ily