Humans and fear of the future

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Directionless and scared these are the feelings that I am pretty sure every one of us has felt at some point in our lives about our future. Many people, especially teenagers struggle to answer the question of "What should I do for the rest of my life?" or "What is the purpose of my life?". These questions, fill us with a sense of anxiety and dread. Even if we know what we want to do, most of the people worry about how to achieve that success in our passion, and is anyone going to support us in our journey? Now that next year I am going to graduate and even though I am pretty sure of what I want to do with my life, deep down I am a little scared for what will my future entail and most of my friends are going through the same thing. All this got me thinking why is this fear such a common thing? so let's answer these questions and see is it even possible to overcome this fear.

Part I:- The Reason for this fear

Now you might think why am I even asking this question. To some of you, it might be pretty self-explanatory, we fear the future because we don't want to be an utter disappointment to our parents and want to be successful. And yes, you should be concerned about your career, financial security, etc. But here is the thing we can be concerned about all this but still be at peace and work hard to get what we want and not be scared for what is coming. So it is here that this anxious mindset for the future becomes toxic and unhealthy for our mental health. With that I think the answers to why thinking about the future make us feel anxious are deeper then we might assume. As far as I know, there are mainly two reasons for this first psychological and second societal.

Now, psychologically speaking we humans love to see and predict patterns so that we can predict the outcome of any situation we get in. This helps us to sense the danger around us. And if you think about it future is just an abyss of randomness and a bunch of variables that our human minds cannot comprehend. So to make up for that our mind scopes out the possibilities and it just so happens to be those predictions are either negative or they lead to several other questions because at the end it's about our survival. And all of this so existential that it is only natural that we get anxious because of it. 

The second reason, the societal reason is rather more prevalent than the psychological reason in my opinion. The reason why I say this is because as we grow up we have these arbitrary societal standards that we think we want to meet to be happy. And most of the time we work only to meet those standards. Yes, some of the things like money are important but one man can only require so much money. Once you fulfil the basic need like food, cloth, shelter, education, etc and most of your desires you are in pretty good shape financially. But still, we like to chase those standards that our society has and financial standards is just one example and there are many others like this. Now I am not saying society is all bad for setting all of these standards. After all, we still have to live in it so to avoid this overthinking and fear of the future let's talk about some solutions in the next section.

Part 2:- How to get out of this fear

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Now that we understand where this fear comes from let's discuss how can we tackle it. So what is that secret formula that can cure our anxiousness for the future and would help us enjoy our lives a little more? The answer is kinda simple and straight forward and that is living your life in the present and focusing on now rather than thinking about what is to come. What do I mean by that you may ask well it means to do what you love and commit to it and enjoying it to its fullest. It could be anything photography, coding, spending time with people you love, etc just do what you love. When you do this you will not even have time to think about the future because you will be busy doing that thing that you love. I know it seems a little anti-climatic but think about it rather than wasting time thinking about what would happen you are actually doing what you want to and respecting the time that you have. Now, I am not against goal setting or anything like that. goals give direction to our life but trying to plan every move you make to fulfil that goal is ridiculous because ultimately as I said the future is an abyss of randomness and a bunch of variables. So trying to overthink over every single detail might turn out to be pointless so commit with what you have and what you feel like doing because it might just be the best thing you never know. It might take some practice to get used to this mindset but in the end, it's worth it. So go ahead and start that business you have been thinking about or start learning a new skill you have been wanting or propose to your crush and start dating her because you don't know if you will get this opportunity again or not and future is uncertain so the only way to escape it's fearful clutch is to live in now. 

Thanks for reading :)