The devil's in the distractions
Happy new year to people with many interests and passions but are still confused about their career
The deadliest condition for creative people is existential choice paralysis. I’ve outgrown that now (I think). This fig or that—who cares. Eat first, evaluate second.
Having multiple passions and being good at everything is a silly excuse for not actually doing The Work. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Anxiety is the privilege of the talented: it dresses up as ambition and fills your head with grand plans so that instead of actually working, you can sit back and feel satisfied wishing to accomplish impossible things, convinced that you’re someone who dreams big or has high standards rather than someone who simply won’t begin.
You—seasoned daydreamer, well-traveled in imagined futures, professionally wistful—are an irredeemable romantic, and I’m not saying that curiosity is a problem, but if you’ve looked for clarity again and again amidst your thousands of passions and still haven’t found it, then maybe what you need is humility: The humility to accept that you can’t do everything, that most things begin badly and many of them can end pretty badly too. That choosing something acute and provisional is not renouncing greatness, and, if your ambition is truly infinitely big, then maybe the greatest embodiment of it is to stuff that leonine appetite for brilliance by mastering one, specific thing. Ars longa, vita brevis—art is long, life is short.
Anxiety wants you to think that your career must arrive fully formed, but notice how that ideal is always blurry. Reality is more high-resolution but less complete: it’s a series of imperfect commitments that slowly shape who you’re willing to become depending on how hard you’re willing to engage. You stand in front of ten doors, convinced that choosing one will permanently betray the other nine, as if a single decision could ruin an entire life rather than simply produce a next afternoon. The most laughable part is you think there was a “right” answer to begin with. Careers are built much more by tolerating the discomfort of partial answers and leaning pigheadedly into the faith that things will work out than by thinking harder or reflecting deeper.
The irony is that people with many interests are the most adaptable, the most sensitive to patterns, the most capable of synthesis. But none of that matters if every choice must be justified in advance by destiny. How pathetic—all those strengths wasted on someone who blames cosmic apathy for their own inability to commit to anything.
Solvitur ambulando—it is solved by walking. If confusion is stressing you out, get moving. Pick something. Touch it. Poke it. Play with it. Fight it. Struggle against it. Hate it. Love it. You get better at it by doing it.
One action is worth a thousand perfected visions spinning in the mind. The anxiety of not knowing what you want to pursue is a fog that thickens the more you stare into it and fades away as soon as you place your hand on something real, because unlike fog, reality has edges, it pushes back and might not flatter you or accommodate your anxiety about whether this is the destined hill to climb, but in its encounter you discover what no amount of soul searching could reveal: that The Work answers when you call it, that your path appears beneath your feet as you walk it—but only if you call it and only if you walk it.
I wrote a book for all those who have a suspicion that they were meant for more:
Happy 2026,
Read more:
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." If Kierkegaard's famous quote is true, the only cure is to imitate the dancer—to set your eyes on a single point and lunge towards it. You don't find steadiness by standing still; action is the only thing that grounds you enough to really flourish.
More: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/less-is-more
“She died trying to do it all” is not a eulogy I’m upset with