I don't plan for the future as much as I should, but I'm trying to change that.
When I was growing up, I kind of just went through the motions of life. I assumed that everything would just keep going, as it was, and that all I had to do was keep doing what I'd been doing, and everything would fall into place in time.
Then I fell off the path freshman year of college, when I started thinking that the world was going to run out of oil, and that the end of modern civilization was going to happen within my lifetime. I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to get everything I thought I'd been going for. So I gave up on life, because I didn't care about/didn't want the world we would be left with after oil ran out. I didn't want to live in a permanently pre-industrial world. And I thought I probably wouldn't survive anyway, since I thought most people would be killed off by violence, disease, medical problems that would be easily preventable in the modern world but disastrous in the pre-industrial world, or starvation. Eventually, the peak oil fear started to fade away, but then I thought that the recession would be forever, and inflation would make it impossible to live a life that used to be considered normal, and I took in all the doom and gloom in the news about how my generation was f*cked. So I was still giving up on life, I just changed the reason for it.
Then, I got off the rails on anti-capitalism. It took me way off course in life. I didn't want to work for someone else, and I thought as long as I worked for someone else, I could never be happy, so I didn't plan my life because I thought I wasn't going to be happy anyway so there was no point. But I didn't think about that to work for yourself, you have to be good at something, which I've always struggled with.
Then I gave up on life because I thought that it didn't matter what kind of life I had, as long as I was a boring person (and therefore single because I couldn't impress/interest anyone, and was stuck in a life I hated/was bored with), which I felt doomed to be, because I thought I lacked genetic talent and an unconventional enough mind, to be someone I actually like being, and to be interesting to anyone. I am still struggling with this one, and looking back I suppose I always have struggled with it. I guess this is my main battle in life.
Now I'm trying to plan for the future more, because clearly the approach I took all my life, has never worked - otherwise I'd have what I want already or at least be on my way - and it's why I've never been happy.
If I never got into all the nonsense - germophobia, peak oil, the recession/inflation/doom and gloom news, anti-capitalism, hating "bad boys", these obsessions that seemed to come one after the other - and stuck to the original plan of being an accountant because it was the thing I could do that made the most money - I would have been in a much better place than this.
However, I still would have had to struggle with the "being a boring person, and probably single because of it" and "not liking myself because I feel genetically untalented and too dull/conventional". I guess that has been my real battle, this whole time.
