What If the Path You’re On Isn’t Really the One You Want?

The Direction Ahead

By Greg Hoyt

Most of us don’t wake up one morning and deliberately choose the life we’ll be living twenty or thirty years later. It happens more gradually than that. We choose a job because we need one, accept a promotion because it seems like the logical next step, build careers, raise families, pay mortgages, meet obligations and keep moving.

Then, every once in a while, something causes us to look around and wonder: Is the path I’m on really the one I want? That question has been on my mind for a long time. In fact, it eventually became the question behind a novel.

A Town Called Brighthaven Bay

I recently published Brighthaven Bay, a contemporary novel set in a fictional Pacific Northwest coastal town. On the surface, it’s a story about people.

There’s Chase Carter, who returns home after his own carefully constructed life doesn’t turn out quite the way he expected. There’s Nick Jensen, who has spent years building a career at the Port in Seattle. But when his grandfather passes away, he faces an unexpected decision: whether to continue along the career path he’s worked so hard to establish or return to Brighthaven Bay and take over the family print shop.

There are college students trying to decide what comes next, adults reconsidering choices they’ve already made, business owners confronting a changing world, and people at different stages of life beginning to notice abilities and interests they may have overlooked. They don’t all want the same thing, and they shouldn’t. But they begin asking some of the same questions.

What am I actually good at? What matters to me? What kind of work would feel meaningful? What could I contribute? And if I knew the answer, what would I do about it?

Those questions became much of the territory explored in Brighthaven Bay. But I’ve come to realize they don’t belong only in a novel.

The World Is Changing Fast

We’re living through an unusual period. AI is changing how work gets done, while the Internet has made it possible for an individual to publish ideas, build an audience, teach a skill, create a business or reach people around the world from a laptop. Entire careers exist today that weren’t realistic – or didn’t exist at all – a decade ago.

At the same time, millions of people still feel stuck in a job they don’t really care about or no longer fits. Some are young people trying to decide what to do with their lives. Some have careers but aren’t sure they want to spend the next twenty years doing what they’re doing now. Others have been displaced by technology or economic change, while some are approaching retirement and discovering that they don’t necessarily want their next chapter to be about simply stopping.

And some people aren’t miserable at all. They just have a persistent feeling that there might be something else they are supposed to be doing. That’s the territory I want to explore here.

Introducing The Direction Ahead

Beginning with this article, I plan to contribute a new article to YourNews each week under the heading The Direction Ahead. This won’t be a weekly advertisement for my novel. It will be a conversation about the ideas that caused me to write it.

We’ll talk about work and purpose, and look at education and whether we’re preparing young people for the opportunities actually available to them. We’ll explore AI, digital communication, entrepreneurship and the creator economy. We’ll also talk about local businesses, storytelling, audiences, and why ordinary people now have communication tools that once belonged almost exclusively to large companies and media organizations.

We’ll explore second careers and second acts, along with hobbies, interests and seemingly ordinary abilities that sometimes contain clues about where someone might go next. And occasionally, we’ll ask questions that don’t have simple answers.

Does your Calling have to become your career? Is “follow your passion” really good advice? What happens when your next career doesn’t have a traditional job title? Why do some people spend years building the wrong business? What skills become more valuable – not less valuable – in a world filled with AI? And what would you build if you stopped waiting for someone else to give you permission?

Those are some of the conversations ahead.

You Don’t Need All the Answers

One of the ideas I’ve become increasingly convinced of is that people often think they need to have everything figured out before they can begin. I don’t think they do. Sometimes the first step isn’t knowing exactly where you’re going; it’s recognizing that you want to start looking.

That’s one reason I chose fiction as the starting point for my novel, Brighthaven Bay. Stories allow us to watch other people wrestle with questions without someone standing over us telling us what our answers should be. We can recognize ourselves in one character and disagree completely with another. We can consider possibilities, and occasionally a story causes us to look at our own lives a little differently.

That’s what I hope this column can do as well. I’m not going to tell you what your Direction in life should be, because I don’t know it. But once a week, I’d like to put another idea, question or possibility on the table. Some weeks it may have nothing to do with where you are in life. Other weeks, perhaps it will arrive at exactly the right time.

That’s what The Direction Ahead will be about. And maybe the best place to begin is with the same question that started this entire journey for me: What if the path you’re on isn’t really the one you want?

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About the Author

Greg Hoyt is the author of Brighthaven Bay, a contemporary novel about Calling, Direction, meaningful work and the possibilities that can emerge when people begin looking at their lives differently. Learn more and step inside the world of Brighthaven Bay at BrighthavenBay.com.