You thought, just like your teenager: How are you supposed to know who you want to be later in life when you don’t even know who you are yet?

No, this isn’t some teaser question designed to grab your attention.

It’s a real question. For you.

And it rests on a very particular conception of identity.

It assumes that somewhere inside a teenager there is already a fully formed “true self” waiting to be discovered.

As if identity came before experience, choices, encounters, environments, and change.

It also assumes that good career guidance consists in matching that preexisting self with a future destination:

first figure out who I am, then decide what I will become.

That is precisely the problem.

We do not choose our future from the standpoint of a finished identity.

We also become who we are through the choices we make, the environments we enter, and the experiences we go through.

A teenager can therefore never know, once and for all, “who they are.”

And not because they lack maturity, self-knowledge, or confidence.

This is where the whole machinery of conventional college and career guidance can kick in.

Guidance becomes a search for a preexisting identity: an inventory of interests, skills, preferences, and aspirations.

Ready-to-adopt identities then provide answers:

I’m creative.
I have a scientific mind.
I’m meant to be an entrepreneur.
I’m meant to help people.

Environments, expectations, narratives, and the categories available to us then help make some of those answers feel more obvious than others.

And once a professional identity has been adopted, it can become highly constraining — to the point that someone may desperately want to escape it after two years of college or ten years in a career.

The perverse effect is that, by repeatedly asking young people to search for this elusive “true self,” some eventually conclude that they simply do not know themselves well enough.

And that becomes the explanation for their vocational wandering.

But the wandering is not the problem.

The problem is the guidance method itself, and the usual assumptions people are taught to think from.

They are often completely off the mark while carrying themselves with the confidence of “we’ve figured this out.”

And for more than fifty years, this has helped produce people who wake up one day inside their jobs wondering where the meaning went.

Teenagers and adults alike then multiply personality tests, maturity tests, interest inventories — the internet is overflowing with them — followed by labels, assessments, and identity narratives, all in the hope of obtaining the certainty they were taught to look for.

We manufacture their uncertainty with a flawed theory of identity repeated almost everywhere in one form or another, and then offer them tools designed to solve what was never fully knowable in the first place.

My approach to college, career, and career-change guidance starts from an entirely different place.