Aimlessness as an Advantage

Maybe It's Better to Not Know What You're Doing With Your Life

T.S. Eliot’s 1915 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was one of the first poems we analyzed in my AP Literature class. My teacher was a big fan of Eliot and enjoyed reciting the long-winded piece to our class in its entirety. He’d stand at the front of the room and read with full affect, like a Shakespearean actor delivering a soliloquy. Most of the class shuffled between online Tetris and Buzzfeed on their school computers while he did this.

“Prufrock” was the subject of one of my first Cafe Hysteria essays, so clearly, my teacher’s efforts at least stuck with me. In the essay, I challenged the dominant interpretation of “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” My teacher told our class that Eliot meant to posit that the poem’s protagonist leads a life centered around mundanities, the “coffee spoon” representing the everyday tasks and insignificant actions that comprise a person’s existence.

I’ve always favored a more literal interpretation of the line, looking less at the spoon’s function and more at its size. When one measures their life in coffee spoons, one consumes it in small doses - taking things a day at a time, an hour at a time, and so on - never looking too far out at the horizon. In hindsight, this interpretation feels slightly less correct, given all of Prufrock’s “visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.” He’s clearly a planner, to a fault.

I’ve always considered myself a planner - someone who fusses over logistics and arrangements, who favors structure over chaos. But I’m beginning to realize that my plans are defined by a metric more akin to a coffee spoon than a century. I’ve always thought that I was looking out at the horizon, but it turns out I’ve been staring at a place just short of it.

Put another way, I’m beginning to realize that I’ve never had a dream job. I wasn’t the type of kid to go through phases with career idealization - an astronaut phase, veterinarian phase, pop star phase, and so on. I’ve always had many things I love to do, but I’ve long struggled to project them onto a career that allows for all of them, likely because that career doesn’t actually exist, at least in the traditional sense.

Graduation day, 2022

When teachers and friends of my parents asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded with varied answers based on my range of artistic interests. I want to be an actress-dancer-writer-artist-world traveler; I want to dance/write/perform/read with my life. The adults would tilt their heads and laugh at my assuredness in my unsureness. Others would help refine my answer, teaching me about more practical, business-oriented jobs that could require these functions in abstract ways. “Digital marketing,” “public relations,” and so on.

In truth, I never thought I would need to define a dream job because I was such an amazing student. I graduated high school with a 4.0 and have never gotten below an A- in a class. I wrongly assumed that my academic prowess would cause employers to come groveling at my feet. I thought that an A+ in school was an A+ in life and that my in-school successes would be like a magnet, attracting out-of-school successes like bees to honey.

I am a few years shy of the millennial generation, but my outlook on school and career felt closely in line with how theirs is stereotyped. Self-righteous, entitled. Me, me, me. A shiny, deserving idealist. I was a believer that reward comes to those who work hard and that my reward would be life - the universe! - revealing its answers to me on a gilded platter.

When you don’t know what you want to do with your life or even what options are available to you outside of a classroom, you will project your ambitions onto the models that are preset for you. Like stepsisters trying to stuff their inflamed feet into pristine glass slippers. After college, I started saying things like My dream job is to be a copywriter. A social media manager. A digital marketing coordinator. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed about becoming a brand architect. I am passionate about brand storytelling. And I actually started to believe it.

How we all begin to sound after writing a few too many cover letters