It's where you least suspect...

You know when you lose something, people often say: "it's in the last place you'd look".  What happens when you lose yourself?  I don't mean like Eminem before a show, but when you're actually lost and don't know where or how to find yourself again?
Losing your identity after graduation is something they don't tell you when you're in university.  We're all socially trained to follow this equation: daycare, elementary school, high school, university/college, full time job, partner, family, death.  Notice how happiness didn't make the cut?  Each part of our education is supposed to be a stepping stone to the next part, but really after your undergrad there is no next part.  If you want to go to do more school you have options, if you want to work, you have options but usually by this point people are likely in debt or needing to pay bills which usually means that the work force plays a role whether full time or not.  So if there are so many options why is it so hard to find work?  Maybe it's not that we can't find work, bur rather that we can't find work that we like to do?
Think of all the menial jobs out there, someone has to do them.  When I was growing up, school was a place that taught us to think big.  How often do you hear little 5 year old Timmy saying he wants to grow up to be a telemarketer?  Timmy wants to be a firefighter because that's cool, that's admirable that's something to strive for.  What Timmy doesn't know is that he's likely going to have to work as a telemarketer for years to pay off debts and put himself through school in order to become a firefighter.  There's nothing wrong with that, yet although we as adults recognize that, we are still inherently programmed to apply for and expect to be hired for the job that we want--the firefighter.  That's why letdowns and rejections are so much more painful because we're not trained to expect "no".  Little Timmy wanted to be a firefighter his whole life but wasn't hired, so now what is he going to do?

Times like these among the height of applications for school and post-grad options, we need to start asking ourselves: what do we really want, and can we really get there.  If, realistically we can't, what are some ways to tailor our path so we can achieve what we want eventually?

Eventually: this should be the word of the day, and quite an underrated word for 20 something-year-olds.
We don't want eventually, we want now.  Sadly, life stops working so easily when you're competing for now with thousands of other people.  It's got to be eventually for a large percentage of those people so what are the chances it'll be you?