Question: What do you want to do with your life?

Answer: I’m not sure that I can satisfactorily answer such a question any longer. The question itself hides a number of troubling implications. For one thing, it would seem to suggest that my wants alone should trump any other possible course of action or reasons there may be for the life I live to be any one way or another. It also, conceals a view to a sort of ‘ownership’ of one’s life (in the sense of it being one’s property) instead of something borrowed or not independently ‘possessed’. With these two implications now exposed, some follow-up thoughts can be advanced in response: 1- Perhaps what one wants to do with one’s life conflicts with what one can do, or what one should do, or what one can’t help but do, or what it is required that one do; and, 2- Perhaps one’s life is not merely some piece of individual property but is instead, in some sense, part of a commons. Let’s explore these alternatives. First, one might question why one’s wants should trump any of the other options and whether or not they in fact can. Recently, the life I live has started to become overwhelmed by the influence of things which I can’t help but do, or think, or be drawn to, and most of these are also things that I think I should do, or that are in some sense required that I (and maybe also others) do. I’m not sure my petty wants are either sufficient to outweigh these other factors or that they in any way ought to be. And perhaps this view of one’s life as some exclusive possession is erroneous as well. One’s life has its biological origin in a union of more than one thing, and from that point forward, it is sustained by an innumerable confluence of supporting elements from the nutrition absorbed and transferred by the mother while in utero, to the air that one breathes after birth, as well as all the social networks that a person is connected to from that first breath to the last. When understood from such a broad perspective, doesn’t the view of one’s life as being an individualized possession look incomplete at best? It is as much a possession of all those things that support its continued existence, for without them, it would not be. So perhaps the question should be reformulated into something closer to the following: What does life want you to do? Maybe what we should all really be doing is expanding our way of thinking beyond the boundaries of the banal nine-to-five lives that so many of us have become complacently settled into and consider what the wider life of the world might require of us (both in terms of the larger social world and in terms of the living ecosystem in which that social world is embedded). We might (likely) find that our wants are relatively insignificant in comparison to the larger needs of our world. And why shouldn’t those potentially greater global needs trump our petty wants instead of the opposite? Why is it that we by and large seem to be content to focus myopically upon our own small personal dramas, dilemmas, and ambitions at the cost of any greater awareness and action in the world and for the world? So, if forced to answer the question of what I want to do with my life, I suppose that I prefer to respond that: I will do what life needs me to do. Maybe you should reconsider the value or importance of that question in ‘your life’ too.