I hate that question, not because I do not understand it, but because I hear it everywhere. It follows me into family gatherings, casual conversations, and even moments that are supposed to feel relaxing. Every reunion with relatives feels less like spending time together and more like attending an interview I forgot to prepare for. The moment I sit down, someone eventually asks about college, work, ambitions, or future plans as if life is a race that everyone else already understands except me.
Sometimes it comes from relatives, and sometimes even from close friends, but no matter who asks, the question always feels heavy. It never sounds curious or gentle. Instead, it feels like a quiet way of measuring whether I am successful enough, ambitious enough, or worthy enough compared to everyone around me.
I used to believe adults asked those questions because they cared, and maybe some of them truly do, but over time the question stopped sounding like concern and started sounding like judgment. It began to feel like people were trying to calculate my value based on how impressive my answer sounded. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, entrepreneur, something stable, something profitable, something respectable— every answer seems to come with expectations attached to it.
And the moment someone says “I don’t know,” it suddenly feels like failure. What makes it even more confusing is that when we are children, adults constantly tell us we can become anything we want. They encourage us to dream freely and imagine endless possibilities. Yet as we grow older, that freedom slowly shrinks until anything only means careers people approve of, jobs that sound practical, or paths society considers successful.
Also the Peer pressure, it is not always obvious or direct. Nobody has to openly tell you that you are falling behind for you to feel it. Sometimes all it takes is opening social media for a few minutes. One person is graduating early, another is starting a business, someone else is traveling abroad, and others are posting achievements, internships, scholarships, perfect grades, relationships, and milestones that make it seem like they already know exactly who they are becoming.
Meanwhile, I am still struggling to understand myself. Deep down I know social media only shows the best moments of people’s lives and hides their fears, insecurities, and failures, yet seeing everyone appear so confident and successful still makes me feel stuck. It creates this quiet panic that maybe everyone else is moving forward while I am standing still, trying to figure out who I am supposed to become.
There are nights where I stay awake wondering if I am wasting my life, not because I am lazy or unwilling to work hard, but because I feel overwhelmed by how quickly the future suddenly becomes real. When you are younger, adulthood feels distant and almost imaginary, but eventually there comes a moment where people stop treating your future like a dream and start expecting actual answers.
Suddenly people ask questions like “What course are you taking?”, “What career do you want?”, or “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” and tbh, 10 years feels impossible to imagine when I barely know what I am doing next month.
Growing up makes you realize how much fear exists behind expectations. Parents are afraid their children will struggle, teachers are afraid their students will fail, relatives are afraid you will not become successful, and because of that fear, everyone keeps pushing you forward.
But sometimes their fear becomes pressure, and that pressure slowly turns into noise so loud that you can no longer hear your own thoughts. In the middle of everyone else’s expectations, I find myself asking what I actually want, not what sounds impressive or earns approval, but what genuinely feels right for me.
The problem is that I still do not fully know the answer, and that uncertainty scares me more than I want to admit. There is also a lot of guilt attached to uncertainty, especially when people sacrificed things for you. You feel guilty for not having clear goals, guilty for feeling tired, guilty for wanting to rest while everyone else keeps moving forward.
Sometimes it feels like slowing down means permanently falling behind. Society constantly pushes the idea that productivity equals worth, as if people are machines designed to endlessly achieve things without ever becoming exhausted. But humans are not built that way. We are not productivity charts, résumés, or success stories waiting to happen overnight.
We are people, and people naturally become confused, lost, and uncertain sometimes. Yet uncertainty feels incredibly lonely because confidence is celebrated while confusion is hidden away. Nobody proudly talks about not knowing what they are doing. Instead, many people pretend they have everything together while privately panicking every night.
There are students smiling in classrooms while secretly feeling disconnected from the life they are living, and there are people pursuing careers they secretly hate because disappointing their families feels scarier than disappointing themselves. That reality is far more common than most people admit.
I wish more adults understood that repeatedly asking young people what they want to do with their lives does not magically create clarity. Sometimes it only creates anxiety, shame, and the feeling that you are already late even though you are still young.
I know people in their twenties who already feel like failures because society convinced them they should have everything figured out by now. But life has never been linear. Some people discover themselves early while others take more time, and neither path deserves judgment.
Recently, I have started realizing that maybe the problem is not that I do not have all the answers. Maybe the real problem is believing that I am supposed to. The truth is that nobody truly knows what they are doing all the time. Some people are simply better at pretending to be confident while improvising their way through life. Oddly enough, realizing that makes me feel less alone.
Lately, I have been trying to ask myself different kinds of questions. Instead of asking what career will impress people, I ask what kind of life would actually make me feel peaceful. Instead of focusing on becoming successful in society’s eyes, I try to think about the kind of person I want to become emotionally and mentally.
Those questions feel softer and more human, like they leave room for growth instead of forcing me into survival mode. I think many young people today are exhausted because we constantly feel observed. Our grades, achievements, relationships, appearance, and future plans all seem monitored by society, and public failure feels impossible to escape because people remember everything.
Sometimes I wish I could disappear somewhere quiet for a while, away from expectations and comparisons, just long enough to hear my own thoughts again. The truth is that I am still figuring things out. I still compare myself to others sometimes, I still feel anxious about the future, and I still dread certain family gatherings because I know those uncomfortable questions will eventually appear again.
But I am slowly trying to become kinder to myself. Maybe life is not meant to be a perfectly planned path that everyone successfully follows. Maybe it is more like a messy journal filled with crossed-out sentences, unfinished ideas, mistakes, rewrites, and pages we slowly grow from over time. And maybe that is okay.
To anyone else who feels crushed by expectations, you are not weak for feeling overwhelmed and you are not failing because your future feels uncertain. Your life is not a competition against everyone around you, and you do not need to become impressive overnight just to deserve love, rest, or respect.
Sometimes simply surviving pressure quietly already requires enormous strength. Maybe one day I will finally know exactly what I want to do with my life, and maybe I will not, but whatever future I eventually build, I hope it genuinely feels like mine rather than something shaped entirely by fear or other people’s expectations.
Tbh, that feels far more meaningful than pretending to have everything figured out.