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This is to all of you out there who don't really know what to do in a couple of years, maybe even get criticised for it, get pressured by parents or friends to finally make plans and feel bad about it. Since I only realized at the last sentence that I accidently wrote it in english I thought I could post it here as well. I admit it's a fricking long text but I'd be really happy if you'd read it. Comments are always appreciated.
In late december I met with a friend whom I haven't seen for about a year. She recently started her masters studies and told me that she still wasn't sure whether this was what she wants to study and still doesn't know what she wants to do (for a living) in general. She clearly wasn't very excited about that. I myself am not yet in my masters but I don't know either. As I later realized this made me start thinking about why people expect themselves and others to have their whole life planned out (and yes, I love thinking and as we'll later see, I also love thinking about thinking).
Yesterday I talked to my dad on the phone. He asked me about the progress of my bachelor thesis, about my plans for the next six months ("Will you live at home until you begin your masters?"), about future plans concerning M.sc studies („Where? What? How much does it cost?“), about what I wanna do with that masters degree. And I'm sick of it, really. And it's not that I just don't care about what others think. I apparantly do, else I probably wouldn't have written this text. It's just that most of my answers were "I don't know, dad." And it's not just that I don't know. I'm good with not knowing. And he knows I'm good with it. I would consider myself intelligent and it's not that I'm too dumb or too lazy to plan ahead. I don't really want to do it, I guess. I wanna focus on right, here right now and not make plans for my whole life. I bet you know this. Sometimes it's very annoying, even feels like a weight of not-knowingness you're carrying around. But most of the time it just feels good. You don't have to worry how each step you do today affects all the steps you have planned for the next weeks, months, years, because you just didn't plan them. Maybe some day I want to plan my future but to this day I don't. This is the only thing about my future I know for certain: I don't want to enforce it. And it works. It might even work really well:
I finished my high school in 2007 and didn't know what to do afterwards (of course). Since I wasn't forced to do my 9 months at the army I kinda had to decide on my own. When surfing through the internet I stumbled upon an organization which was in constant need of volunteers whom they put in contact with day care centers for mentally or physically disabled people ("Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr", if you're german). So I decided that I want to do one practical year before starting further studies (learning in school really sucked big time and I didn't know university was different yet). I applied and got assigned to a center where I was supposed to help drive disabled people around. But they forgot I didn't have a drivers license by that time so I had to be reassigned to a day care center where I helped care about mentally disabled people for 12 months. And honestly it couldn't have gone any better. I worked in a group with two trained workers and we were responsible for eight people with severe mental and physical disorders. It was the toughest group with the most work of the entire facility. I learned three major things when I worked there.
1) One of my co-workers switched after 3 months of me being there. It soon turned out that the new one was an alcohol addict (so I basically had 9 people to care about). Fortunately, the other co-worker was intelligent, really really caring and always on top of everything. But there where times she wasn't there. Since I soon noticed the addict did the most basic things somehow wrong, not clean (literally) or not at all, the responsibility for those eight people lied in my hands. It felt like a big burden, I didn't sleep very well during that time, was often tired and soon my co-workers knew they couldn't talk to me before I had my first coffee (yes, I somehow became an addict myself, haha). I had to work very hard, concentrated and fast. I had to learn how to control my emotions. Not just one time I wanted to yell at my co-worker addict for doing incredibly stupid things. Working there was a very valuable experience for me. I really learned how to deal with big responsibility while watching the inconsiderate behavior of others.
2) I learned that I wanted to do something that challenges my mind. After six months of working I noticed that I got dumber. I don't know whether this was actually the case but during work I had to do the same stuff over and over again (It's like spending 6 months thinking about how to put bricks on top of each other to create a wall. It's interesting at first but once you know what to do it gets boring because you don't have to think anymore.). My mental degeneration wasn't that terrible because I knew it would end in half a year but I definitely couldn't imagine to do something like this my whole life. The point is: You have to have tried it to make this experience. If you got from school to university you will never know whether such work might be an alternative.
3) While studying the behavior of those eight different mentally disabled people I really got interested in cognition. How does cognition work? How can it be that those people behave so different from us? What do they think? How does thinking work in general? I started to surf the internet and read about exciting phenomena concerning thinking and the brain. And then, one night, when reading an article about autism I stumbled upon the term Cognitive Science (I'm not kidding, really, it was pure accident again... you might call it fate if you like). I read its Wikipedia article and – for the first time in my life - I knew what I was going to do next. What I wanted to do next.
I didn't know whether I was interested in all the disciplines Cognitive Science has to offer. All I knew was: If I like something, I'll focus on it. If I don't, I'll drop it. Admittelty the first year went rather bad grade-wise. But I met incredible people and had a lot of fun, which is of outmost importance I believe. I soon began to realise that Cognitive Psychology was the the field I liked by far the most. For exmaple I had a course during which we had to design an experiment in a group, carry it out, analyse the results and write a paper. Although it was really demanding, I had incredible fun. Today I'm sitting here spending my morning writing this text rather than writing on my bachelor thesis. But I really don't feel bad about it. My bachelor thesis is about how motivation has an influence on basic cognition (i.e. Attention). I know it's going to be another three months of tough work, but I know I'll get it done, I don't worry, I'm not afraid of failing because I really like the topic. And I know, if I like something, I have no problems doing it. I never had.
What I want you to think about, to take away from this: Most of very important lessons I learned in my life happened on accident, not because I planned them! If you have the liberty to choose (with that I just mean that you don't have to take a random job right now because you would die otherwise) do something you enjoy right now, not what you might enjoy in the far future. What makes you happy right now. Have the rest figured out on its own. If your parents want you to be a lawyer but you find it boring, don't do it. If you want to impress the hot girl in your class by becoming a pilot but secretely hate airplanes, don't do it. You might say: „Well, but I have to make lots of money later, what do I do?“ Of course you could begin studying what statistically gets you the most money. But chances are that you struggle through six years of education not liking at all what you do, get a job you hate and feel really bad all the time. Wouldn't you rather do something you really like, be incredibly good at it and get a little less money? I definitely would. Thinking about it this way, I also know what I want do in the future: My dream is not to make lots of money. I only want to do something that makes me happy in that specific moment and I want to figure it out step by step. I'm even truly convinced you cannot possibly know this years in advance. Although I don't know what I'm going to do, I know that it's going to be awesome because it will be what I want to do. So all in all I feel really good about it. And you should too.
 
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I'm all for living life without a plan. The first time I did that was when I dropped out of college (thereby dropping "the plan"). My question is: how will you eat if you never plan anything?
That's pretty cool that you figured out what you want to do. I was super excited about engineering but after 2 years of it I was completely burned out and didn't bother finishing the degree. I tried to just push through it for another 2 years and finish, but at the end of those 3rd-4th years at university I had only advanced another full semester. I had become a drug addict and I lost my friends, which has made it harder to make new ones ever since. I dropped the drug habit but I never started going to classes again. The end of the 4th year I tried switching to music for a semester, but the people I met seemed very immature and pretentious and I again found it very hard to make real friends, so I ended up dropping out of school.
So what will you do if you find out you don't like it after the first year or two of going through the new experience? Will you try to push through and get the degree anyway? Will you go into debt after losing scholarships because you skipped class and started failing? Will you switch majors? Go to the army? Get a mind-numbing job? Or just live with your parents?
I started to call girls women around age 19. I've since realized that was a mistake, because I haven't met any real women born after 1980. The girls here are so immature and expect so much that I haven't wanted anything except to remain single until further notice. I had a girl once who seemed like she was on my level, but on our first date she just texted her friend the whole time, so I basically ate alone and tried to restart conversation every couple minutes. She literally sat silent the entire time. After that I didn't speak to her again, she tried to make me jealous by hooking up with someone else and getting her roommate to see what was up, but I didn't bite. How could she change so much in so short a time? Then I thought about other women I know, and the older ones don't seem much different, they seem lazy and unloving. So for now I don't want to get married, because apparently all girls want is money and control. I didn't want kids for the longest time but in the past couple weeks I've been wondering what my children would be like. I try not to think about it too much because I don't want to marry. What's your future look like here? Do you want to get married? Do you want kids?
My dream is to become a musician but I don't know if I want to score movies (writing for full orchestra), produce hip-hop tracks like my major inspiration Nujabes, write music for indie games or simply practice piano. Right now I'm running out of money, I only have enough to pay rent for the next month and food for this month. So my freedom is almost over, I will soon have to have a job just to pay my student loans, rent, and food. So next Monday I'm gonna start looking. I need to make my first two weeks' paycheck by early February. So much for not having a plan. It felt good while it lasted, though. Now I'm beginning to learn that failing to plan really is planning to fail. I also want to make an indie game and write a novel. But those are stories for different days.
Anyway I hope you get where you want to be in life. Sometimes reality slaps you in the face and your world and your beliefs get turned upside-down. I guess you can't really plan for that. Instead you must scramble to pick up the pieces and make quick choices based on new information. Like the temporary-ness of friends and the immaturity of basically anyone under 35.
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Thanks for your elaborate answer, you're raising some really important questions. I must admit I didn't really think about what happens when you don't know what you want and don't find it out in time. If I had found out after one or two semesters that I don't want to study what I study I would have switched only if I knew what I wanted to study. If you have no clue about what else you really want to study (because your initial plan failed after 1-2 semesters) you should definitely push through. But if you, let's say, started studying some kind of Engineering and didn't like it overall, but during that you found out that you like doing math, then you should consider switching to math I guess. I didn't like all my subfields while studying, so I dropped the worst ones and pushed through the less-worse ones which I had to pass to get my degree, always knowing, that I know what I like and doing that for my masters and already focusing on it in my bachelor. But you're right, if you're study programme doesn't provide this flexibility it can get pretty tough to call and I have no clue what I would have done in that case.
A crucial point is: My thoughts in general probably only apply to a social society like Germany and not to the United States, where having a job is everything and study fees are high. In Germany, study fees are quite low, we have a social system to fall back on if a major (short term) plan fails and thus not everything relies on you having a good job. Of course it helps, but I don't have the pressure you Americans might have. I have good support from my family as well. But that's what I meant: Do what you want as long as you have financial independence respectively don't have to worry that much about finances in general.
One thing that's really important for me at this point: I intended to only talk about career choices, not relationships. This is a whole other story and very, very complicated indeed. And I have not been able to solve it for myself. Like you I was a long time very happy with being single, because I'm probably really picky. For instance I really like a girl who I was studying with. Very smart, overwhelmingly beautiful and the kindest person on the planet. She had a boyfriend (who was a huge asshole, of course) and is a very private person so I didn't want to get too close. But even when they broke up I didn't try anything because I consider her being way out of my league and didn't want to make a fool out of myself. So I just innerly complained about how unfair the world is and led it be.
I don't know whether I wanna marry or not, whether I wanna have children or not. Probably both, yes. But as I mentioned above, I won't take anyone who has boobs or something  so it's not gonna be easy.
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I'm glad you're able to find something you're really interested in. I think your advice is very good in theory but can be challenging to apply in reality
I don't entirely believe in only living for the moment, although that certainly can lead to a lot of happiness and contentment. One has to have somewhat of a plan for the future. Even you have chosen a field you liked and are presumably working hard for a career in it. However, any student thinking that if they just tough it out now, then the future will be a "fairytale" ending is in for a rude surprise. I think the learning process is the most important and enjoyable part of any job. If you can't find some satisfaction in what you're learning, the job won't be much better heh. My 2 cents!
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Xusneb: Living for the moment does definitely not work for a lifetime (if you're an ordinary person at least) but maybe for a period of time to help you find yourself and fnd out what you really want in life.
I guess it's best if you balance living-for-the-moment and planning out. If you don't plan at all you probably get fucked up sooner or later. However if you only plan everything you worry way too much than needs to be. Overplanning is as harmful as not planning I believe.
What I'm trying to say is if you don't want to plan certain weeks or months ahead or if you don't want to plan certain kinds of decisions (like what to study) then others should be fine with that and don't pressure you to "plan already". Only because they might have planned such a decision doesn't say you have to, too.
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EPT
