I have been seeing a therapist lately. In the past month alone, I’ve been into four sessions, and the experience has been equal parts liberating and unsettling. Liberating, because it gives me a kind of map for my worries and anxiety. Unsettling, because having that map means I can now see exactly how real those worries are, and there’s nowhere left to hide from them.
One day I asked my therapist whether she sees other designers in their 40s going through the same career confusion I am, this constant searching for meaning in everything, this craving for some kind of stability and psychological safety that I couldn’t quite name before. She said she didn’t have specifics, but that there’s a theory that tends to explain a lot of it. She told me that people generally seek different things in each decade of their lives, and when she laid it out, something genuinely clicked for me.
Your 20s, she said, are defined by one sprawling, exhausting question: who am I, actual…
