Exploration or procrastination?

In your 20s, the most common line of advice from older friends is something like ‘explore and learn as much as you can before you turn 30’.

It sounds like great fun, but as you get older you start to wonder, ‘how much learning is too much?’, or more specifically, ‘how much of my learning is actually an excuse for my turning away from responsibility and action?’.

It is quite difficult to argue that learning is not beneficial, but is there a way to lead your ‘era of exploration’ in a way that is actually productive? For example, i’m sure you could find some the utility in studying the impact of The Beatles dynasty on 21st century music, but as pre-med in undergrad, perhaps that isn’t serving your goals of becoming a neurosurgeon. If you have an iota of sense, you would understand that’s a reasonable argument.

Here’s the isssue. I talked about lying in my last post; the thing that makes lying so appealing is that it works—at least in the moment. That can be a dangerous thing. It’s easy to get absorbed by this ‘ability’ to warp the world around you to your will—that’s often what people do when they chase power. One of the negative consequences of lying is that you probably aren’t the best judge of what you need, and so once you betray this ‘spirit of truth’, it takes an extra step to get back on track, but then you also convince yourself of a delusion that you may very well chase for the rest of your life.

So back to The Beatles analogy, you could argue that claim makes total sense, but I also think you can make an equally strong case that you might already be chasing that delusion. We’re already assuming that when you decided you wanted to be a neurosurgeon in high school, you actually knew that was going to be the career you ended up with in 20 years time—which by the way, you didn’t. There’s no reason to believe that you couldn’t possibly want to change career paths after the first year of medical school; or a sudden melomania won’t imbue your ‘professional 180’. Yeah, maybe it’s less probable, but we’re talking about the rest of your life here.

Anyways, that’s more niche, but you probably wrestle with this issue even in your everyday decisions. The bottom line is, how do you delineate between meaningful exploration and lazy procrastination?