Can you give me some life advice? I don't know what I want to do for a living, and it makes me anxious.
Sure. The only advice I know that actually works is "learn to make friends," so I'm going to repeat that advice with slightly different wording.
Think about what things in your life you're most satisfied with. For me it's my friendships. When I think about which things in my life I would miss if they were gone, it's my friendships a lot of the time. My family, my romantic partner, and my hobbies are close seconds and thirds, but the list is entirely dominated by my friends.
So one good rule of thumb is: if you want a good life, get the kinds of friendships that you value. This is just like "follow your dreams" in that it's vague and requires some thinking about what you want. The reason I mention it is that having friends at all seems to me to be a necessary precondition for even trying to have the kinds of life you want.
Life has a lot of regular things that people do. You will probably need to do some of them. And sometimes they are fun. But what makes life worth living is all the weird stuff you don't need to do. If you don't have friends, even your interests will become boring. Even with friends, most of the time is just work and sleep. But if you have friends, you have someone to watch bad TV with you, you have someone to look forward to seeing, you have someone to talk to, you have people you'll make things with, you have people whose jokes you know and like and can look forward to hearing again. All these things make the rest of the time, even its most boring and work-like parts, into things you can enjoy, even enjoy looking forward to. Life can be a lot of suffering, but it's also quite fun, when you've got good friends.
I remember you posted once about how much you like MLP. The problem with MLP (in isolation, without any community or social context, which is kind of a silly way of talking about anything, but the issue with the show you were talking about was a specific thing you were focused on) was that the pacing was too fast. If a show was too fast-paced, it didn't really have time to make its characters interesting. Even if the individual scenes were good, it was all too fast for you to have time to build up affection for the characters, or even just feel like you knew them. Wouldn't it be nice, you thought, to see a show where every scene took its time and had its own music and didn't have to run as fast as the next one?
So my advice is, don't run your life so fast you don't have time to make friends. Make time. Try to have a good time, as much as possible, even if the stakes are small, and even if the circumstances don't seem that important or exciting. Get in the habit of saying "yes" to invitations from people you don't know or aren't all that close to. Say "yes" to social things even if they're boring or boring-sounding. Say "yes" to learning new skills, even if those skills seem like they wouldn't be very important or useful. Life is strange, and most people are probably going to underestimate how much having friends is a prerequisite to feeling fulfilled. The norms of a good life might not be the same as what you predict from individual cases, or even from averages. Life is not MLP, where the entertaining parts are all upfront and immediately obvious and you're just running from one good scene to the next. Most of the entertainment in life is at the intersection of circumstances you're not sure about, situations you wouldn't choose to be in because they're boring or just don't seem like something you'd "want to do" but that end up being fun, unexpected, or interesting. The stuff that's actually great, the "wow" moments of life, rarely come from "choosing" for them, even if you do your best to choose for them.
Try to do the things that fill up the corners of the space you'll have to explore. Everything is going to do that. The things you need to do will do that. But there's no point in being a bystander in your life. Don't just "watch" life, "participate" in it. Your life will be very strange, in good ways and bad ones. Stuff will happen that is out of your control, that you don't want, that will even be really bad. But life is also full of possibilities. Things change. It's important to take advantage of this. Make friends. Because even when your life is not what you want it to be, it is still a place where you can make people you care about, and where you can learn new things. Some of those things you learn might even be about how to improve your life, and some of them will probably end up being invaluable to you in ways you couldn't have predicted.
