Career Counseling

Unreasonable Life Plan

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You’ve got to take feedback that your life plan is unreasonable, unrealistic, impractical, etc. with a grain of salt. Why? Because most of the people giving this feedback are narcissistic in the psychoanalytic sense of the word. They’re looking at your situation through the lens of their own subjective biases. With a little more insight they’d see what they really mean is that your life plan is unreasonable, unrealistic, and impractical for them, not necessarily for you, but they lack this insight so they unwittingly project their own set of circumstances onto your set of circumstances.

Actually what’s unreasonable from the existential point of view is capitulating to outside voices, letting these opinions take precedence over the authentic inner voice that knows what the necessary conditions are for self-actualization. A life plan that seeks to make these conditions manifest is reasonable even when that life plan is a long shot. We each only get one crack at human existence, one chance to fulfill our destinies as we understand them, one opportunity to develop our unique potentialities to the fullest.

If you fail at least you had the courage to try. You will have picked up valuable abilities along the way that you’ll be able to mine for other endeavors. People who always choose to be ‘reasonable’, ‘realistic’, and ‘practical’ are able to do so mainly because they fool themselves into believing their existence is permanent, that they have all the time in the world so they can afford to put off their self-actualization. If they could pull themselves out of this narcissistic mentality for just a moment to see how fleeting their time on earth really is, how meaningless most of the ‘reasonable’, ‘realistic’ and ‘practical’ things they do are when taking the long view, they would be willing to take some risks too.