Why Haven’t I Found My Passion Yet?

It seems every day I surf the web I read an article or list about how we all need to follow our true passion, quit working for the man, and become our own boss. Maybe give in to our wanderlust, throw some world traveling into the mix and sell all of our possessions. Yeah! Sounds awesome right?

But what if you haven’t found your passion yet? Or what if your passion is not something practical? What if you can barely afford to pay all of your bills and have a social life each week to even attempt to start saving for such ventures? What if you have pets? Family obligations? Shit going on?

I know, I know. I can already see the commentators telling me that those things are trivial and if I really wanted to, I could have the life I wanted. I bet they’d call me lazy and complacent. Trust me, I’d love nothing more than to say “fuck it” and storm out of my office guns blazing and go on a permanent vacation. The problem is that I don’t know what I want to do. It’s been 26 years and I still can’t figure out what truly makes me happy. Wine and food make me happy, but what am I going to do with that? New shoes make me unreasonably happy, but I can’t have a career in buying shoes for myself. That won’t earn me money. It will cost me dearly, am I right ladies?

All too often I feel like I cannot find my direction in life. I am always jealous of those people who seemed to have their life path figured out the moment they entered college. Those people whose major never changed since freshman year and who are now working in the field they earned their degree in, happy as a clam. They know who they are and what they do. They have a vision. They’re not pulling their hair out and having mini anxiety attacks on the regular about their future.

I on the other hand, always seem to be wandering around aimlessly, floating through life with no purpose and it makes me feel really lost. Like everybody else has figured out some secret that I haven’t. The person I imagined I might be at this age is not the person I am becoming. I wake up and feel trapped. I feel trapped and confused and I don’t know what to do so I end up do nothing. It’s vicious. I really would love to get my shit together. Does anyone else feel this way?

I don’t want to sit here and whine about my life as I know there are plenty of other humans who have it way worse than I do. I know it’s as simple as coming up with a solution to a problem people don’t realize they have yet. Or creating an app and selling it to Facebook. Or just not even caring about money and enriching my life by traveling and becoming more “cultured”.

How can you come up with a brilliant idea without knowing your true passion? The best businesses are the best because the people running them truly care about what they are doing. How do we find that for ourselves? How do we discover our passion before it is too late?