In the time I was dating a musical theatre BFA, I became a musical theatre minor, began taking voice and dance lessons, and started obsessing over the difference between my theatre BA and his musical theatre BFA. I was certain I would only be happy when I was a musical theater actor.

Half a year later, I became enamored with a frustratingly well-read and culturally apt journalism major, at which point it suddenly became obvious to me that I, of course, would actually be happy as a writer and journalist. Overnight, I tossed out dancing and singing with an eagerness that belied the overwhelming disinterest I held toward a career in musical theater, in favor of reading collections of nonfiction essays and keeping a notebook to track my sophisticated observations about “Orange County in the Fall.”

As it happens, I joined Annenberg by next term.

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While going out with a chemical engineering major, I found myself daydreaming about the alternate timeline in which I had chosen a career path in STEM. Unlike singing, though, I could not pick up chemical engineering through weekly lessons outside a graduate student’s garage in Culver City who I later discovered primarily taught middle school girls. In this case, I was fortunately resigned to fantasy.

It is with certain confidence that I say if I was dating Oscar, the green Muppet from Sesame Street who lives in the trash, it would not be long before I started wondering why I am not more green and whether or not I should pick up dumpster diving as a hobby.

If you are someone more fluid and exploratory, curiously weaving through life like it is a series of experiments, being in close proximity to someone who is hellbent on their life’s purpose can be consuming. Your weightlessness can get caught in their gravity and begin warping the lines of your identity. 

I have long been inclined to diagnose this as a self-worth issue, and though in certain respects it can be, I found it more constructive to shift my perspective and view it as a misunderstanding of my nature as that aforementioned airy explorer. 

This reframing requires first to remember that uncertainty is not an absence of meaning — the person who has known that they want to be a filmmaker since childhood is not worth more than the person still trying to figure out exactly where they fit into the entertainment industry. 

That is not to say that there are no tangible benefits from having certainty in one’s life purpose. For example, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Hong Kong and Cornell University have demonstrated that a sense of purpose can contribute to positive outcomes in areas like financial success and personal wellbeing.

Purpose, however, does not need to be defined in terms of a career. Your purpose can transcend those boundaries — maybe your hope is making people laugh, building a family or helping others who need it. Each of these is nebulous compared to something concrete like being a pilot, but that does not mean you cannot commit to them with every fiber of your being.

Moreover, though research is promising for those with a fervent sense of purpose, the data isn’t so optimistic about someone sticking to one career throughout their life. 

According to a study by Prudential, one in five workers made a recent career change as of March 2021, half of them viewing these changes as permanent steps in their career. 

Moreover, FlexJobs’s 2024 State of the Workforce Report indicated that a majority of workers plan to change jobs within the next six months. Nitty-gritty details like pay raises, remote work flexibility and workplace culture were the most important factors in considering whether to remain in a certain job, while ‘a strong sense of purpose’ wasn’t among these factors.

Careers can be uncertain, and feeling that uncertainty is not evidence of a lack of purpose or flimsy identity. If you are figuring out your path, let that be what you are doing — fully, intensely. 

When faced with the musical theater actor who has been dancing since childhood or the pre-med student who has known they would be a doctor since middle school, you can allow their passion to inspire you, see if they might teach you more about yourself and remember: you have no reason to falter in your conviction. Meet them eye to eye as an equal.

Kevin Gramling is a senior writing about his search for meaning amid the daily chaos of being a USC student. His column, “The (S)existentialist,” runs every other Thursday.