Dear Lazies: On Career and Passion
Closer to Thirty, Further Away from Your Dream Career?
Welcome to the very first Dear Lazies newsletter – a space for open reflection guided by your questions, inner dramas, and desires. Brought to you by Lazy Women’s editor-in-chief, Zsofi.
To get a sneak peek of this column, this first edition is offered to all our subscribers for free, with subsequent editions only available to our paid Lazies. If you liked this column, support us with just 5 EUR a month and get both the Lazy Women + Dear Lazies newsletters straight to your inbox.
For this first newsletter, I’m featuring not one but two of your questions since they felt similar in many respects, and because they show that many of you are going through similar dilemmas.
Dear Lazies,
I recently turned 30 and feel more lost than ever. I've spent years studying, getting a master's, finding prestigious internships, only to realize that the path I’ve been working toward doesn’t actually make me happy. But the idea of letting go is so terrifying. In my free time, I am an artist, and I love it, but making a full-time living from it feels nearly impossible, especially with how things are right now. But at the same time I am so miserable in my current job. I see so many people online making it by following their passion, but it just doesn’t seem realistic for me. How do you even make the leap from a stable, well-paying job to something so uncertain - without completely risking your ability to pay rent and survive?
&
Dear Lazies,
I’ve been in career limbo for 2 years now at 28. I went for my dreams and kind of achieved them to realise it wasn’t what I wanted. Since then, I’ve tried different working styles and different jobs and just not finding the drive, the inspiration, or the passion I once felt for my original dream. Worse yet, I’ve been applying for jobs recently and struggling to get even an interview. I feel like I’m trapped in this cycle of confusion and not getting further. When opportunities are infinite in our growing, interconnected world, I feel passionless, trapped in a box of emptiness and comparison to all those possible lives we can so easily see online. I’ve tried all the exercises to connect with my intuition and develop self-awareness but the answer is not revealing itself. When being patient becomes unbearable after so long, is there really nothing else I can do? Thanks for reading my rant!
Dear Lazy Writers, thanks for sharing what you’re going through – I know the struggle and can relate to many of the thoughts expressed. I’m structuring my answer around these key themes, and I hope you find some of it relatable:
The difficulty of our twenties as a defining decade
What we sometimes forget when looking for our “dream job”
Why is online comparison never a good idea, and should you monetise your passion?
The “Terrible” Twenties: The Great Scattering
Approaching 28, I have been pondering the changes one goes through in the “defining decade” of our twenties, and how those experiences have had a major impact on my career choices. In a podcast episode recorded with my dear friend Una on the “quarter-life crisis,” we explore the contradictory expectations of this life phase, which I think is useful to evoke here to kick off our reflection.
Besides it being an exciting time for many – disclaimer: speaking from privilege here – with no real adulting responsibilities, our mid-to-late-twenties also are the time when “structured life” as we knew it in comes completely undone. As explained in this video, from zero to twenty, our entire life has a certain predictability to it, dictated by our education. Once leaving uni, we are no longer following a strict, prescribed life structure, where we are constantly meeting the same milestones as the rest of our peers. What the author Mel Robins calls the “great scattering” hits: we all go in different directions, hang out with different people, and are left to our own devices to navigate the “real” (and sometimes scary!) world of adulthood.
In my personal experience, for a while, nothing seemed to really matter. A freshly graduated “girlboss” without a clear goal, I jumped from one serious job to another, all within the field of my studies (politics), trying on different roles and seeing if anything would fit. As the years started to add up, I accidentally built myself a portfolio that made it easier to never question what I really wanted and to continue on that pre-paved path.
Both of you Lazy Writers point out how much of our twenties are spent thinking we are doing the right thing, only to realize that we have been still just following (internalised) expectations or a dream we had in a completely different life phase. I’d like to add to this another observation, specifically relevant to career decisions.
Who We Are vs. The Tasks We Actually Enjoy
As me and my friends are getting closer to 30, a trend I have observed that might resonate with you, Lazy Writers, is that many of us, when choosing careers straight out of uni, focused a lot on the kind of professions we want to pursue based on our interests, life ambitions, and values (for example, social scientists going into international organisations or law; languages/liberal arts students working in art galleries or literary agencies, our more rationally-minded pals going into finance, etc.). In these examples, we often only think of our professions on the level of abstraction - what it means in terms of title, recognition, outward perception and beliefs, and the kind of life it “promises”.
While these are all important factors, in my experience, very little thought goes into evaluating what those careers entail in terms of the actual daily tasks and work environments.
Still empowered from our studies where our fields of interest mattered enormously, we thought that “making it” would entail being close to that specific world that resonated with us. But in many cases, while these “dream jobs” offer the recognition of the title or the alignment with your personality, the tasks we are required to perform, especially in our junior years, have literally zero resemblance to our interests, and it is even questionable whether they would actually ever bring us closer to them.
The feelings of burnout and being profoundly lost can arise in such situations. When you “realize that the path you’ve been working toward doesn’t actually make you happy”, as our Lazy Writer #1 describes, comes with a sense of guilt and alienation. After all, how could you be so wrong about yourself and your goals all along? Why can’t you just feel good in a job you worked hard towards, and one that you’re based on all your previous investments, you are supposed to find meaning in. So you push yourself harder while alienating yourself and questioning yourself further.
Many of my artsy friends are struggling with this in their work in art galleries – wanting to become artists themselves but actually finding themselves in a money-oriented, sales-y role, which has very little to do with their sensitivity for beauty. Personally, going down the international organisations route, I loved the recognition and idea of myself of having the EU and the OECD on my CV. But in reality, I hated the formal-bureaucratic, inflexible, fake-structured environment and lingo that came with it. That was my daily reality. Having switched now to a day job that is, on the surface level (eg. the topic the company deals with), somewhat out of touch with my interests (blockchain, lol), but that brings tremendous fulfillment and self-soothing in terms of the tasks I get to do (writing, editing, and most importantly, working with warm and creative people in a quiet space in my own time), I feel surprisingly much more authentic in this unexpected role, while no longer seeking absolute alignment or self-fulfillment solely through what a job can bring.
All this is to say is that in society, we are encouraged to find our path based on recognition. I’m not saying your overall profession shouldn’t matter at all – in an ideal situation, both interest/ethics and the personal fulfillment derived from your daily tasks would align. But to get there, perhaps it’s time to go back to the basics and think about competencies. When contemplating your next professional pursuit, start by asking yourself:
What kind of tasks do I actually enjoy doing over a long period of time? Is it communicating with people or doing my own thing? Working on a tight schedule or in my own rhythm?
What kind of work and human environment makes me feel at ease?
What are my key stressors? Is it noise, lack of structure, early mornings, offices, or something else?
While it might sound basic, try to think of your answers without any presumption about what role you think you should perform those tasks in.
Instagram People, Having it All
Dear Lazy Writers,
It strikes me that you both emphasise online comparison in your questions, although I’m not one bit surprised. After all, even the most feminist, progressive social media bubbles can become toxic just by seeing too much of it – the (seemingly) sheer amount of people who (seemingly) build successful non-profits and purpose-oriented businesses, give up their “boring 9-5” to become full-time coaches and yoga teachers, write body-positive poetry that goes viral, sell their art, or become “full-time content creators” – and the list goes on and on.
I’m going to start by stating the obvious: you see very little of how the lives of these “successful” people actually are, and you should always take everything you see online with a grain of salt. Most of us tend to share a highly curated version of ourselves, in which often even the messy “unfiltered” moments are posted to complete a certain image. When influencers do this to balance out their otherwise pitch-perfect content, I think it’s just straightforward malevolent cringe. Guilty of being chronically online myself, I know that social media alone will rarely give you the answers you are looking for, not because you wouldn’t find amazing things on it, but just because by its nature, it can be an intrusive space and feel overwhelming.
Second, I don’t think that “just going for your dreams” is always the right answer. Hear me out; I am conflicted about this myself, but I don’t think that all creative passions and hobbies should be monetised. Obsessed with the idea that “time is money”, in my view, giving into that impulse thinking we actually “hack the system” (capitalism), we can end up even more chained to it. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this in any case, but be mindful of the consequences of transforming what you find pure joy in into a money-making (and therefore inherently burdensome) activity. I’m wondering whether it’s something like this that happened in the case of Lazy Writer #2, where you put so much pressure on yourself to align your passions with your job, and now having faced the realities of even this can feel like a duty rather than a desire, you feel fundamentally out of touch with yourself, questioning whether you can trust your intuition ever again.
So where does that leave us, dear Lazies?
In both situations, our Lazy Writers feel trapped in a situation, whether it’s in their current job or in the lack of securing one. For Writer #1, my instinct would be to focus on figuring out what aspects of your current job make you feel miserable. By naming them, it might help you in your search for something that is more suited to you in terms of activities. When thinking about “making the switch”, the pressure of finding the perfect one – implying total change – can lead you to further procrastination and dread, counter-intuitively slowing down the process of your improvement. In my view, to make such a leap of faith, you first need to be in a workplace (and subsequent headspace) where you don’t feel burned out, where you feel like you have options, and where you can finally empower yourself with the kind of confidence you will need to pursue your passion as a career one day.
Finally, Writer #2, I think it’s time we accept that our dreams can change and evolve, just as everything around us. Holding on to what your intuition dictates when it no longer does is trying to stop the movement of time, our evolution, and our never-ending changing nature, which makes life feel messy, but ultimately makes it feel like living. Maybe, instead of trying to speed up the mystical process of figuring things out and finally knowing it, channel patience into being patient with yourself, meaning how you view and accept yourself, even if that means taking another random job that’s not fully “you”. In the confidence of knowing you will figure it out, but giving yourself real, pressure-free time, I’m certain you will get there sooner than you might think.
I’ll leave you with a beautiful quote from Jenny Odell (the ultimate lazy woman!) that I often remind myself of when figuring things out seems particularly far away.
"The future is always over the horizon, and to be alive is to be in transit."
Go further:
/Book/ Saving Time - Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by
/Show/ Fleabag
/Podcast/ The Psychology of Your 20’s Podcast with
/Article/ What’s the Rush? The Pressure to Succeed Young by Napsugár B.
/Vlog/ Feeling Behind in Your Twenties? by
/Substack/ Beyond the Ambitions of Our Younger Selves by
/Substack/ Everything Everywhere All at Once by
💜 And that’s a wrap for the very first edition of Dear Lazies! This column will continue to evolve, bringing in fresh perspectives and voices from our community. If you enjoyed it, don’t miss out on future editions—subscribe to stay in the loop.
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What’s your take on the question? Share your thoughts and advice for our Lazy Writers in the comments, and join our community discussion on the topic of the “quarter-life crisis” on Thursday, March 20th.
🫶 Finally, special thanks to Isabelle Toutounji for the illustration. Isabelle in an illustrator and psychotherapist in training based in Paris and NYC. Her watercolor work ranges from highlighting the beauty of everyday life to illustrating psychoeducation topics she is passionate about.
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Thanks for writing this! Really needed it - just turned 28 and me and all my similarly-aged friends are going through the same existential quarter-life questions: how to balance wanting to do something 'meaningful' with the reality of paying the bills, the fear of pursuing our passion vs the fear of regret if we don't - and the feeling that we are surrounded by people who seem to have their shit together effortlessly (and even if they tell you they don't).
loved the meticulous approach to questions + i’m fascinated that people trust us enough to ask advice from us🥹