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Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned inadvance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries,schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even.Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely becauseit encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to futureevents. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself infive years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a littlegame and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employerswant to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting backand forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you playin order to ‘get ahead’.

“We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.”

In reality, people frequently don’t know what they want andpsychology has proved it. That’s why career planning, or at the veryleast just deciding what you’re going to do next, is so unpleasant.It’s no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. Thereseem to be so many different options, each with myriad branchingpossibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but allequally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it isno wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know andfollows in parental footsteps. But we don’t all want to trust the triedand tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decisionall of our own, based on our own values and preferences.

Midlife crisis

If it’s hard at 18, it’s even harder in midlife when people aretheoretically better equipped to make their choice. In reality by your30s wide-eyed optimism has normally been replaced by a more cynicaloutlook on jobs and the workplace. Now it’s more clear what thedownsides of certain jobs are. There’s not only our own experiences ofwork but we also have friends at work, all of whom colour ourperception of their careers.

Everyone has their own internal trade-offs. How much routine do youlike: boring but safe)? How much do you like travel: exciting butyou’ll be away from loved ones? How much do you care about earning moremoney: and taking a more boring/stressful/less fulfilling job? Whateverthe outcome of all these swings and roundabouts along with many more,the reason that deciding what to do with your life is so difficult isthat it involves predicting the future.

There’s many reasons why it seems we should be good at predictionwhat we want. If I know that I’m enjoying what I’m doing now, then Ishould enjoy it in the future shouldn’t I? On top of this I’ve gotyears of experience building up a set of things I like - cinema, books,sitcoms - and things I don’t like - trips to the dentist, severeembarrassment and flu, especially not all at the same time. If I’ve gotthis huge bank of likes and dislikes it should be easy to predict mywants in the future. And yet, it seems we are often surprised by whatthe future throws at us.

Miswanting

“We are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future.”
The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future hasbeen termed ‘miswanting’ by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to arange of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make ushappy in the future. My favourite is a simple experiment in which twogroups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in theexperiment - a doozie for any undergraduate.

One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entireweek in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want eachday. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favouritesandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich.This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.

Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that whatthey’ll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose aturkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. Itturn out that when next week rolls around they generally don’t like thevariety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly lesshappy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches onthe day.

Prediction failure

This variety versus sameness is only one particular bias that peopledisplay in making predictions about their future emotional states.There is another counter-intuitive bias emerging from the work beingdone in positive psychology. This looks at how people predict they willfeel after both catastrophically bad, and, conversely, fantasticallypositive occurrences in their life. For example, how good would youfeel if you won the lottery? Most people predict their lives will becompletely changed and they’ll be much happier. What does the researchfind? Yes, people are measurably happier after they’ve just won, butsix months down the line they’re back to their individual ‘baseline’level of happiness.

So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we’ll feelabout winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting whichsandwiches we’ll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing ourfuture selves. And if we can’t even decide what type of sandwich wemight like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we’dlike to be doing in twenty years?

With age occasionally comes wisdom. Over time we learn, whetherimplicitly or explicitly, that we are not that good at predicting thefuture. At the very least we begin to recognise it is a much lessprecise science than we once thought.

A stranger future

This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, onsome level, you know it. That’s why it might be hard for an 18 year oldto choose their career, but it’s a damn sight harder for someone inmidlife when limitations have been learnt.

“People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties…”

This might seem like just another way of saying that people get morecautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It’s actuallysaying that it’s not caution that’s increasing with age, but implicitself-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holdsvanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem tobe under our most direct control, like our sandwich preferences.

Best guess beats careful planning

The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives whichinvolves making a prediction about what we might like in the future.Career planning becomes painful precisely because it’s such animportant decision and we come to understand that we have only verylimited useful information.

The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess,try it out and don’t be surprised if you don’t like it. But forheaven’s sake don’t mention this in your interviews.