What do you hope to be doing in 5 years?

I hate this question. I got asked it two years ago, and the year before that. I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer it considering that I don’t know what I want to be doing when I’m 26 or 27, let alone what I’m having for dinner tomorrow night.

If you had asked me 5 years ago what I thought I was going to be doing today, I wouldn’t have said living in Israel, studying for the LSAT before going to law school. I would have said I would be interning at a publishing house in New York City, working my way up to becoming an editor while working on my own manuscript. And so much has changed since. Life is funny that way.

And I still can’t answer that question. To be honest, I can’t tell you a lot of things.

When I graduated college, I think I assumed something magical was going to happen. That the tassel was going to move, and I was just going to know. Know without a doubt what I want to do professionally, know how to pay bills, know how to budget effectively, know what I’m already doing, know how to host a classy dinner party with friends, know who I’m going to be.

Yet, here we are, six months post-graduation and, once a day, I still think how am I allowed to be an adult?

I reach for my phone to call my mom every time I don’t feel well, I text my sister constantly about my friends and in dire need of advice, and my dad is my go-to guy on all my technology questions.

And let’s not forget about the internet.  If I have no idea how to do something, the whole world – or almost all of it – is at the tip of my fingers.

But still…

I have no idea what I’m doing.

Google is no help. Google gives me WikiHow articles. Google gives me advice columns about making my bed every morning, checking my ego, calling people back in a timely manner, being grateful. But that’s not how to be an adult, that’s just how to be a good human being.

I guess what I want to know is: when do I start knowing?

And I’d like to know. Just know. I’d go to school forever if I could – study literature, law, politics, teaching, history, art. I’d learn and study and then maybe I’d have the knowledge. But I doubt it.

See, school is really useful in that it gave me – and will continue to give me – critical thinking skills that are useful in the real world to an extent. But what’s going to give me the knowledge (maybe I should be referring to it with a capital K) is getting out into the world and working and acting like an adult.

But how am I supposed to know how to be an adult? High school and first year of university classes take so much care to introduce you to and ease you into what it is to be a college student. Then, you get to senior year, you have your graduation gown and you’ve decorated your cap, and what do you get?

An empty diploma booklet and a bag full of “goodies” containing an envelope asking for donations.

No helpful hints on how to actually be an adult – just a drawn-out graduation speech from some household name celebrity that has vague references on how to succeed as an adult. Not that I didn’t like my graduation speaker – he was actually quite funny – but his advice didn’t have a lot of weight. His speech was engaging and full of humorous anecdotes that, surrounded by the magic of graduation, really inspired me.

But here I am. And… I feel like I’m floundering.

As millennials, my peers and I face a lot of criticism about being lazy or spending too much money on avocado toast or feeling better than our jobs.

But it’s the opposite. We have to work twice as hard as other people to prove ourselves, to make our voices heard, to make our positions matter. Our toiling away in jobs we feel better than is because the job market demands experience in fields we don’t have experience in due to our toiling away in school for 17+ years. I’ve had a job since I was 15 and I still don’t have enough office experience to even interview to be someone’s assistant.

So how am I supposed to use my fancy degree from a fancy university to do anything other than something I feel might be slightly below me due to the lack of experience I have. (This statement does not apply to what I’m doing right now in Israel – it is obviously a feeling expressed in cynicism about the job market in America.) So yeah, we feel better than our jobs.

How could we not? We’ve been in school for 17+ years working our butts off for jobs we can’t get.

And, personally, all I see are other people my age floundering and putting on their work clothes every morning pretending they know what they’re doing – just like I do. None of us really know anything, so we eat our avocado toast with pride because at least we know that avocado is amazing.

I’m not trying to make excuses for my generation. Really, I’m not. I’m just trying to understand. And I’m sorry if you came to this blog post looking for some sort of conclusion. I don’t have one.

Yet.

So, I guess, for now, I’ll stick with the age-old adage of fake it ‘til you make it. After all, that’s what everyone else is doing…right?

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