When you do not know what you want
Siddhartha, Meursault, and Demian test three kinds of drift: searching, refusing, and becoming.
The job, city, relationship, and project all seem possible, yet none feels chosen from the inside.
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.
Books in order
- 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.
Further reading
- Letters to a Young Poet — Rilke writing to a young man who has asked whether he should be a poet, and whether he is doing the right thing with his life. Read it after the three above; the famous instruction — to live the questions themselves, rather than press them for answers — is the path's final move, given as letters from one anxious young man to another.
- Walden — Thoreau on a deliberately small life. Read it as the older argument that the not-knowing what one wants is sometimes better answered by simplifying than by deciding — a different kind of clarity, available only when the auditioning of larger lives has stopped for a while.
- Tao Te Ching — Laozi on the way that cannot be named. Read it for the cosmological version of the same patience the rest of the path has been building — the not-knowing as a real place to live from, rather than a problem on the way to a solution.
- Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life — 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.