When you don't know what you want
Books for the drift — neither panic nor purpose, just the long not-knowing.
You can list the things other people want. You cannot list the things you want. The career, the city, the partner, the project — none of them are wrong, and none of them are quite right, and you have been here long enough to suspect this is a real state rather than a temporary one.
Reaching for the find-your-purpose genre, the ikigai industry, the career-design workbooks. Each of them is structured around the assumption that the not-knowing is a problem with a method, when much of the serious literature on the same condition treats it as a real, sometimes long, sometimes valuable, period in a life — and asks the reader to live it as a period rather than to escape it as a problem.
The reading path
- Siddhartha — Read it in one or two sittings. Notice how Hesse refuses to make any of Siddhartha's lives ridiculous — the ascetic, the merchant, the lover, the ferryman. Each is a real life, taken seriously, and the novel's gentleness is the form of its argument that the auditioning was itself part of the answer.
- The Stranger — Camus on a man who does not know what he wants either, but who has stopped pretending otherwise. Read it for the flat exact prose; Meursault's is a more uncomfortable version of the not-knowing, held without religious or philosophical consolation, and it is useful precisely because Camus refuses to dress it up.
- Demian — Hesse again — earlier, more philosophical, more European. Read it as the bildungsroman of a young man slowly coming to understand that the life he has been auditioning for is not the only life on offer, and that the work of the not-knowing is partly the work of finding out what was forbidden in the family that taught him to want.
Why this order
Not knowing what one wants is one of the few conditions modern culture is most impatient with, and the literature that treats it seriously — Hesse, Camus, the older bildungsroman tradition — is offering instruments for living the not-knowing rather than systems for ending it.
Held back, and why
- Ikigai — Find-your-purpose literature, career-design books, and similar frames. The relief they offer is real but it is the wrong relief for now; the writers above are doing the slower work the workbooks are designed to skip.