Career planning, job interviews, life coaches, counselors - they all ask, "where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?" The truth is, I've never really known my answer to this question and I'm not sure I ever will. For all the time I spend anxiously imagining the what-ifs and what-thens of how things could go wrong in the future if I don't get things right in this moment, I have always had a very hard time conjuring up a picture of what I will want to be doing 5 years from now. Hell, I can't even guess what I'll want for dinner tonight, how can I guess what kind of work will feel exciting and important enough to motivate me years from now?
It has always been much easier for me to get excited by something new than to finish something which once was exciting but is no longer new. Over the years, I've learned a lot about the strategies that help me get back into the work and get things done even when the ask is ambiguous or there are overwhelmingly many steps between here and there. If I hadn't, I could never have finished a PhD, after all.
Yet one of the reasons it feels so difficult to imagine myself 5 years from now is that so much has changed across every 5 years. If I were to pick any time in my life and look 5 years later, I'd pretty much always find myself somewhere unexpected, excited by something I couldn't have predicted, having grown in ways I couldn't have known I would. In some ways, this means I don't want to find a job where I feel like I know where I'll be in 5 years, because a lot of the moves I've made that felt right for me, or the things I've been most proud of, came from going on spontaneous side quests and jumping on the train of opportunity when it passed by.
Perhaps the best advice I've gotten for imagining my future was to focus not on the specifics of the job or the people, but rather on my values, which I'd expect to stay fairly consistent. In what ways would I want the characteristics of this future job or life to align with my values? For instance, even if I don't know what the specific field of work will be, I can say that I want to be doing work that helps make the world a more equitable place. Even if I don't know whether I would want to work for a large organization or for myself, I could say that I'd like to ensure that I support the people I work or collaborate with by providing an environment in which they can be the best versions of themselves.
That worked - I did find my way to a career where I felt like I could do the things I was skilled at in support of making science a more equitable place. But then the world changed, and eventually, the same work felt like it was in service of the opposite goal, and no longer aligned with my values. So once again, I'm trying to figure out not what I want to be doing in 1 or 5 or 10 years, but even just what I want to be doing next. But this time, I've been dropped into a new continent and the maps I had sketched out for the possibilities of where to go are no longer useful. I no longer know what areas lie north or east or west of me if I orient myself to my moral compass. I guess it's time to brush up on my cartography skills and start exploring.