I Dont Know What I Want To Do

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I spent most of my twenties feeling completely lost. Confused. Wondering if everyone else had figured something out that I’d somehow missed.

The truth? They hadn’t. Most people are wandering. The difference isn’t that some people have it all figured out.

The difference is that some people have decided to walk anyway.

“I don’t know what I want to do” reflects career indecision—the inability to specify an occupational choice—and it’s one of the most common experiences in adult life. This isn’t a personal failing or character flaw. Research from vocational psychology identifies two types of career indecision: developmental indecision (a normal, transitory exploration phase) and chronic indecisiveness (associated with anxiety and poorly developed identity, which may need professional support). Most career confusion is the developmental kind, which resolves through experimentation and action rather than endless analysis.

Key Takeaways:

• Career confusion is normal and well-researched: This isn’t a personal failing—vocational psychology recognizes developmental indecision as a documented stage most adults experience
• “Follow your passion” advice fails most people: Research shows most people don’t have clear pre-existing passions, and passion doesn’t predict satisfaction—autonomy, mastery, and purpose do
• Clarity comes from action, not analysis: Knowing is the result of doing and experimenting—not the reverse
• Small experiments beat perfect decisions: Informational interviews, career experiments, and job crafting help you explore without committing prematurely

Why You Feel This Way (And Why That’s Normal)

Career indecision—defined by vocational psychology as “the inability to specify an educational or occupational choice”—is extensively researched and remarkably common. You’re not uniquely broken or failing at some fundamental life task everyone else mastered. This is a documented developmental stage.

If you’ve sat at your desk wondering “what am I doing with my life?”—you’re not alone.

Research from the Journal of Vocational Behavior describes career indecision as “a stressful, anxiety-provoking experience” that’s “associated with great psychological distress and low levels of well-being.” That matches what you’re feeling, doesn’t it? It’s not just confusion—it’s the anxiety that everyone else has it figured out. The feeling that time is running out. The shame around not knowing.

But here’s what matters— vocational psychology distinguishes between two types of career indecision.

Developmental indecision vs. chronic indecisiveness—two types that matter:

• Developmental indecision: A normal, time-limited exploration phase. You’re figuring things out. This is typical during career transitions, identity formation, or major life changes. It resolves through action and experimentation.
• Chronic indecisiveness: Persistent difficulty making decisions, often linked to anxiety, low self-esteem, and poorly developed vocational identity. If you’ve been stuck for years and the anxiety is overwhelming, this may need professional support.

Most people experience the first type. It’s part of Holland’s vocational identity development—gaining clarity about your career-relevant characteristics takes time and exploration. The shame around career confusion is unwarranted. This is a developmental stage, not a character flaw.

The Myth You’ve Been Told (And Why It Doesn’t Work)

The most common career advice—”follow your passion”—fails for two research-backed reasons— most people don’t have a clear pre-existing passion to follow, and matching your work to a pre-existing interest doesn’t predict career satisfaction anyway.

Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor who has studied career satisfaction extensively, calls this the “Passion Hypothesis”— the belief that you must first identify your passion, then pursue a career centered on it. Sounds logical, right? You know what’s interesting? Research shows it’s backward.

Two problems with the passion hypothesis—both backed by research:

1. Most people don’t have a clear pre-defined passion. Especially young adults. Newport’s research found that the vast majority of people lack a single, obvious passion waiting to be “discovered.” If you’re waiting for that lightning-bolt moment of clarity, you might wait forever.

2. Matching your job to a pre-existing interest doesn’t predict satisfaction. What actually drives career satisfaction? Not passion alignment— autonomy, mastery, and relationships. Properties of how you work, not what you work on.

Newport offers an alternative— Career Capital Theory. Instead of searching for a passion, you “put in hard work to master something rare and valuable, then deploy this leverage to steer your working life in directions that resonate.” In other words, you don’t follow your passion— passion follows you as you work to get good, to craft a really compelling career.

The passion hypothesis isn’t just unhelpful—it’s backward. Passion follows mastery more often than it precedes it. If you’ve been beating yourself up because you don’t know your passion, stop. Most people don’t start with one.

For more on this distinction, see our guide on purpose vs. passion.

What Actually Drives Career Satisfaction

Career satisfaction doesn’t come from matching work to pre-existing passions—it comes from three intrinsic factors— autonomy (control over your work), mastery (improving at something meaningful), and purpose (contributing beyond yourself).

What makes work feel meaningful? Dan Pink’s research in “Drive” identified three key elements in enduring motivation.

Autonomy— having a measure of control over what you do and how you do it. Not micromanagement. Not rigid constraints. Freedom to make decisions about your work.

Mastery— making progress and getting better at something that matters. Humans are wired to seek improvement. When you’re learning and developing real skills, work becomes engaging rather than draining.

Purpose— doing something that makes a difference or contribution beyond yourself. This doesn’t mean saving the world—it means your work matters to someone other than you.

Here’s the thing— these factors exist independent of the specific job. A teacher can have high autonomy-mastery-purpose. So can a nurse, a designer, a plumber, or an accountant. The “perfect job” is a myth. What matters is autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and these can be built in many different roles.

This connects to Amy Wrzesniewski’s research on work orientations. She identified three ways people relate to their work:

What’s remarkable? Wrzesniewski found these differences exist independent of occupation or demographics. Even among people doing the exact same job, some experienced it as a job, some as a career, some as a calling. People who see their work as a calling are more satisfied professionally and with life in general.

You don’t need to find the “perfect” job. You need work with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And you need to relate to it as meaningful— which brings us to how that actually happens.

If you’re interested in exploring this further, check out our article on finding your life purpose.

How Clarity Actually Happens (Action Over Analysis)

Career clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder or taking more assessments—it comes from experimentation and action. Research by Herminia Ibarra shows that “knowing is the result of doing and experimenting,” not the reverse. The conventional wisdom is backward.

Most career advice tells you to “know first, then act.” Figure out what you want, then pursue it. But Ibarra’s research on career transition found the opposite. Clarity emerges from trying things, not from sitting and analyzing.

I love this research. It validates what so many of us intuitively know— clarity doesn’t arrive in a lightning bolt. It emerges through trying things.

Waiting for clarity before taking action is like waiting to be in shape before going to the gym. Action creates clarity—not the way around.

Ibarra calls this “Working Identity“— the process of career transition through trial-and-error experimentation. Career transition, she found, “is not a linear path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of ‘possible selves.'”

Three ways of working identity:

• Experimenting with new professional activities— Try new projects, skills, roles (even temporarily)
• Interacting in new networks of people— Talk to people in different fields, attend events, build relationships outside your current circle
• Making sense of emerging possibilities— Reflect on what you’re learning from experiments and conversations

Here’s what people get wrong— they think clarity arrives first, then action follows. A 32-year-old marketing professional unsure about staying in the field learned more from three informational interviews than from six months of self-assessment quizzes. The conversations revealed what the assessments couldn’t—what the daily reality of different roles actually felt like.

Transitions happen “one step at a time, by trial and error, experimentation, and incremental experience.” You don’t need full clarity to start exploring. Exploration IS the path to clarity.

For more structured guidance on this process, see our article on how to find your career path.

Practical Ways to Explore (Without Burning Everything Down)

Career exploration doesn’t require quitting your job or going back to school. Start with low-cost, low-risk experiments— informational interviews, skill-building projects, and job crafting your current role while exploring.

Informational Interviews

An informational interview is a 20-30 minute conversation with someone in a field of interest. This is NOT a job interview. You’re not asking for a job— you’re exploring whether this path aligns with your interests, values, and skills.

Why bother? Because 85% of jobs are filled through networking. More importantly, talking to people actually doing the work reveals things no career assessment can.

How to do informational interviews:

• Identify 2-3 fields you’re curious about
• Find people in your extended network (LinkedIn connections, alumni, friends of friends)
• Send a professional request— “I’m exploring career options and would love 20 minutes of your time to learn about your experience”
• Prepare 5-7 questions about daily work, challenges, skills needed, how they got there
• Listen more than you talk
• Keep it to 15-30 minutes
• Send a thank-you note

If you’re worried about “bothering” people— don’t be. Most people are willing to talk about their work for 20 minutes. And an experiment that tells you “this isn’t for me” is a successful experiment. You’re not looking for validation— you’re looking for truth.

Career Experiments

Career experiments are a methodical approach to forming and validating hypotheses about your career path. The key is to make experiments as low-cost, low-risk, and low-distraction as possible.

Types of low-cost experiments—choose what fits:

• Take an online course in a skill you’re curious about
• Do a side project or freelance gig in a new area
• Volunteer for a cause related to a field you’re exploring
• Shadow someone for a day (or a few hours)
• Attend industry events or meetups
• Join a professional community online

One career changer spent 3 months doing informational interviews with 12 people in data analytics before deciding it wasn’t the right fit. That’s not failure—that’s efficient exploration. She saved herself years of pursuing a path that wouldn’t have worked.

The critical part? Talk to people actually doing the work. Reading about a career is not the same as having a conversation with someone living it. And measure what matters to YOU— not what matters to career advice blogs.

Job Crafting While You Explore

You don’t have to choose between staying in your current job and exploring new directions. Wrzesniewski’s job crafting research shows you can reshape your current role to increase meaning while you explore next steps.

Job crafting— changing tasks, relationships, or perceptions in your current work to make it more fulfilling. This works for “okay but not fulfilling” roles. (If your job is toxic or abusive, job crafting won’t fix it— that’s a different conversation.)

You can create fulfillment in your current work while exploring what’s next. It’s not binary. And sometimes, crafting your current role reveals that the problem wasn’t the field— it was how you were engaging with it.

Overcoming Decision Paralysis and Perfectionism

Decision paralysis in career choice is often driven by perfectionism—the belief that there’s one “right” choice and you must find it. Research shows perfectionism drastically slows or halts decision-making, trapping people in cycles of over-analysis and indecision.

Career decision paralysis means feeling mentally blocked, unable to make clear decisions about your career. Sound familiar?

Here’s what clinical psychology research shows— perfectionism strongly correlates with indecisiveness. Especially maladaptive perfectionism—the kind characterized by fear of mistakes and concern over errors. High perfectionist traits? High indecisiveness. People who scored high on indecisiveness also reported lower decisional confidence.

Perfectionism tells us there’s only one “right” choice, but in most situations, several options could work out just fine. The fear of choosing “wrong” creates commitment issues and anxiety. But here’s the reality— multiple paths can lead to fulfillment. This isn’t a high-stakes, irreversible decision. You’re choosing the next experiment— not your forever career.

Strategies for overcoming paralysis—four that work:

• Choose “good enough” rather than perfect— Several options could work. Pick one and commit to testing it.
• Set decision timeframes— “I’ll decide by Friday” forces action. Open-ended analysis breeds paralysis.
• Narrow to 2-3 strong options— Too many choices overwhelm. Eliminate the maybes.
• Reframe the decision— You’re not choosing forever— you’re choosing what to try next.

The biggest career mistake isn’t choosing “wrong”—it’s not choosing at all. Staying stuck in analysis paralysis is choosing by default. And that’s the worst choice.

If you’re waiting to feel 100% certain before taking action, you’ll wait forever. Certainty comes after the leap, not before.

Moving Forward Without Having It All Figured Out

You don’t need to have your entire career figured out before taking the first step. Career clarity builds incrementally through action, experimentation, and reflection—not through perfect planning.

Let’s recap what we know from research:

Career confusion is normal. Developmental indecision is a documented phase most adults experience. “Follow your passion” doesn’t work for most people— career satisfaction comes from autonomy, mastery, and purpose, not from matching work to pre-existing interests. And knowing comes from doing— clarity is the result of experimentation, not analysis.

Herminia Ibarra put it perfectly— “Successful reinvention comes not from deciphering and analyzing our past, but from inventing and testing our possible futures.”

Your next three steps:

1. Schedule one informational interview this week. Pick a field you’re curious about. Find one person. Send the email.
2. Design one low-cost experiment. What’s something you could try that costs little and reveals a lot?
3. Job craft one aspect of your current role. Where can you reshape tasks, relationships, or how you think about your work to increase meaning while you explore?

One more thing. If you’ve been stuck for more than two years, or if the anxiety is overwhelming and interfering with your daily life, consider professional support. Developmental indecision resolves through action. Chronic indecisiveness may benefit from therapy or career counseling. There’s no shame in getting help— that’s also a form of taking action.

Clarity is built, not found. Every informational interview, every experiment, every moment of reflection adds a piece to the puzzle. You don’t need a map. You need to take the next step.

I believe in you.