The confusion and uncertainty of today’s world can make finding your way seem overwhelming, especially as a young adult. Do I stick with this job? Do I move? Do I go back to school? What about personal relationships?
It helps if you have a clear set of guiding principles. What kind of a person do you want to be? What is important to you, and is it different from what is important in the grand scheme of things?
We can wander through life, pulled one way or the other because everybody seems to be doing this or that, and so we feel we should do this or that. Or we can be influenced by advertising or the glut of silly information we pull from social media. We can get lost in trivia and find our weekend is gone, week after week, month after month.
Been there. Done all that, especially in my 20s. I had no idea what direction my life should be headed, so I followed the first person I found who seemed to know what her mission was. Let me tell you, that was a mistake.
Now is not the time for that story. What I want to do is point you to two writers who spend time on the subject of discernment—how to figure out what direction to take, or how to make decisions about important things in a way that will help you find your way to a meaningful life.
I advocate prayer first of all, regular, sustained prayer. So does this first author. He also advocates getting your worldview straight.
The second author deals in how to make good choices— how to sort out what is really important to you, personally, from all the things you sort of want because it seems like the thing to do. A personal story: I was 18 and working in a burger joint not far from an army post. There was one GI who came in pretty frequently. One day he came and sat at my table as I was eating lunch. I didn’t know the guy at all, really. He said that he was turning 25 and everyone in his family was married by the time they turned 25. Okay. Then he asked me to marry him. He needed someone, anyone female because it was time to get married. That was a bad reason for getting married.
If you want your marriage to last, you need a very good reason for wanting to marry someone, so good that you are willing to promise to spend the rest of your life with him or her, because a time may come when that promise is the only thing keeping you together through a bad patch.
So let me introduce you to someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to identify what really matters.
Both these guys are philosophers (lovers of wisdom), and both are Catholic, though a lot of what they say is universal. And both write meaningful essays that are worth your time.
If I may—one last word of counsel. Have patience with yourself. God does.
Thanks! Made my day!
Thank you so much for the mention and the kind words. I look forward to reading Anti-Memetic!