Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
I’ve lived my life always planning ahead.
My whole generation had the idea of planning drilled into us. We needed to always know what we were doing next. Anything to the contrary was a failure. To be standing still was to be sinking in quicksand.
I actually rather liked planning. I ended up building career experience around it. A few years ago, I ended up crafting a GANTT chart with somewhat made-up dates on how to get a legislative bill through the UK Parliament in record time. It was planning that gave everyone a sense of reassurance despite the whole project being a terrible mess.
Yet here I sit without a plan. It’s the antithesis of what I’ve been taught and know.
Planning for planning’s sake is a creature comfort in delusion. The truth is that there is little point in planning too much right now, as I have little grasp of where my life is heading. Any time I’ve tried to plan anything, I’ve ended up trying to rush my recovery, and life has hit me hard.
So now my focus is simply taking it day by day. Sometimes there are too many moving parts to be able to actually plan our lives. That’s probably true for more of us than we would like to admit. Coming to terms with the fragility of our lives is too frightening to deal with.
Planning is good when we have a clear goal in mind. There is certainly a place for it in many aspects of our lives. But attempting to plan everything in our lives becomes impossible when we live in such a complex world. With the world changing as much as it is, it’s becoming practically impossible to predict what might be happening in five years time, let alone in twenty.
At its worst, creating delusional plans can end up being harmful. It often gives people a false sense of security, or creates blind allegiance to a truth that never was. Many people fail to see the warning signs that something might be wrong because the idea that their neatly crafted plan going off-track is too scary to contemplate.
In my last job, the idea of planning sounded nice, yet nobody had the discipline to follow it. When a plan got knocked off course, it was far easier to blame external circumstances for the problems, rather than taking a genuine look as to whether things were set up correctly in the first place.
I think there is a level of radical honest in saying that we simply do not know. It’s a statement people are absolutely frightened of, particularly in overly-educated, intellectual circles. We’ve spent so long learning how to sound convincing that we are scared of being ‘found out’ as not having all the answers.
But the truth is that nobody can really have the answers right now when so much is unclear. It’s okay to not have a plan when there is so much we do not know.