When considering what to do with one’s life, it’s important to understand the bounds. What are my actual options? What is realistic? What are the constraints and limits? It’s fun to think about how I want to be an interstellar explorer person, but it’s not very useful because that’s just not going to happen.
“If you can conceive it, you can achieve it” is obvious trash, the self-help version of cotton candy laced with bits of fiberglass insulation. It’s tasty for five minutes, but then you get a sugar crash and eventually you’ll die clawing at your insides.
Also, limitlessness is kind of boring. Why do anything if everything is possible? The real possibility of failure and defeat is the tension that generates everything good in life. I love constraints. Constraints are where creativity happens. Constraints are an anvil upon which to hammer your will, forging something durable and beautiful. Without that solid, real constraint, actions are floppy and useless, like hammering a bit of metal held in the air. Nothing happens and you look like an idiot.
For my current purpose of figuring out what to do with my life, I’m extremely interested in the ramifications of consumer society ramming head-first into the constraints of the real bio-physical-energetic world, and what constraints that situation implies for my own life. It goes like this:
A consumer-based culture is terminally flawed, because it's based on the notion that the purpose of humanity is to eat the earth, turn it into garbage, call the process "economic growth", and pretend we can do it forever.
Thus, every individual will become a post-consumer, either by choice before the terminus, or because there is no choice after the terminus. Better to beat the rush.
This is actually great news, because being a consumer kinda sucks (except maybe for the 1%, I wouldn't know, but who cares). The subversive, borderline seditious truth is that we don't need all this stuff to live happy and healthy lives, and in fact over some modest threshold the excess decreases the quality of our lives due to the diseases of affluenza.[1]
There aren't enough resources on this planet to maintain high consumptive lifestyles, and so everyone who is consuming over some amount is consuming someone else's piece of the pie. In other words, we're at a big buffet table, and people living normal First-World lives are heaping up their plates and the people at the back of the line aren't going to get enough.[2] There is a very real moral element here, although none of our ethical seems are capable of dealing with this issue well. Those of us living >1 planet lifestyles are taking more than our fair share. We're living unequitable lives. We're not doing it on purpose, it's not our fault that we got into this situation, and the system is rigged to make getting out of this situation seem difficult or impossible, but it's now our responsibility to get out of this situation nevertheless, because we're the ones who are here now.
What we as individuals can do right now is to begin the process of reducing our resource consumption to approximately equitable levels, because it’s something that is going to happen one way or another anyways, and ‘they’ show no signs of helping us manage a smooth transition, so it’s in our own self-interest to start figuring it out our damn selves. There are a variety of flavors of this: voluntary simplicity, self-sufficiency, de-growth, enough-ism, Permaculture, minimalism (various sub-flavors), anti-consumerism, the list goes on. My flavor of choice is Emergent Renaissance Ecology, because I’m a huge nerd.
Many people, I suspect, would label the above list as rather doomery of me. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s only doomer if you think that a consumer culture is the only sort that is capable of providing amenable circumstances for the cultivation of good, meaningful, fulfilling lives for those within it.
I happen to take an opposite view, hence the above list fills me with a special kind of optimism. At least I feel like I have some sense of reality, of bounds, to the option space for my own life. And that’s much more comfortable of a position to be in than the vague uneasy sense that all of my plans and dreams are built on vapor.
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[1] Being a consumer is better than starving to death, which is what society was solving for at the time, so it's important not to get too righteous about humanity's turn toward consumerism over the past few hundred years. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was, but it went runaway and septic and now it's eating itself, and that's a big big problem.
[2] Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity