How to find my calling at 25 if I have spent half my life doing what is expected of me

It's 11:47 PM on any given Tuesday. You close your laptop with that strange mixture of exhaustion and emptiness, open Instagram to "disconnect" for five minutes, and, in thirty seconds, you see a college classmate launching a startup in Lisbon, a high school friend showing off their office with a view, and a cousin who has quit their job "to find themselves" in Bali. You turn off the light. And then the question you've been avoiding all day appears:

What am I doing with my life?

If you are 25 years old (or 24, or 27, it doesn't matter) and that scene sounds familiar, this text is for you. Let's talk about vocation. But not the way you've been told.

The story you were sold and why it no longer works

You were sold a very specific story: get good grades, choose a career with job prospects, do a master's degree if you can, find an internship, land your first decent job, get promoted, buy a car, get a mortgage, find a stable partner, have kids when the time comes. A script. Clean, orderly, predictable.

The problem is that this script was written for a world that no longer exists. And you are performing it in 2026.

Look around you. Generative AI has been eliminating junior roles in consulting, marketing, and development for three years faster than universities can update their curricula. Your law school friends are watching an automated agent review contracts in minutes. Your friends who stayed in banking are witnessing layoffs that arrive via email on a Thursday at five. And meanwhile, on LinkedIn, everyone is "thrilled to announce" things that don't seem nearly as exciting when you close your screen.

The uncomfortable truth is that the map you were given has been obsolete for years. And no one has taught you how to make a new one.

That's why, at 25, you feel this way: not because you are an outlier, not because you have "generational anxiety," and not because you've made poor decisions. You feel this way because you are crossing the threshold between two worlds without having seen anyone do it successfully before you.

What vocation is not (even if it has been marketed to you as such)

Before we get into what it actually is, we need to cut through the noise. Because there are a lot of things masquerading as vocation that are anything but.

Vocation is not that 47-question online quiz that tells you whether you fit better as a "strategist" or an "explorer." That is emotional marketing disguised as psychology.

Vocation is not the passion productivity influencers talk about when they tell you to "follow your passion." Passion alone builds nothing. Many passionate people end up bitter because their passion finds no way to serve anyone.

Vocation is not that idyllic job where you never get bored, never get frustrated, and everything flows seamlessly. That job does not exist. If you wait to find it, you will be waiting for a very long time.

Vocation is also not what your parents call "vocation" when they actually mean "prestige and stability." Doctor, lawyer, civil servant, engineer. That's fine if it calls to you. It is terrible if it calls to you only because it reassures them.

And vocation, above all, is not an answer. It is a question you keep refining.

The real question: who are you?

There is a scene in an old comedy starring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson that José Ballesteros uses in his lectures to leave people speechless. Nicholson plays a therapist. He asks a patient: "Who are you?". And the guy responds: "I'm an assistant manager at a pet supply company." Nicholson cuts him off: "I didn't ask you what you do. I asked you who you are." The guy tries again: "I'm a nice guy and I play tennis on weekends." Nicholson, patiently: "Those are your hobbies. Tell me who you are."

The patient doesn't know how to answer.

You probably don't either. And that's okay: almost no one does. But that is precisely the heart of the matter.

Ballesteros frames this with a formula that sticks with you. There are three verbs that govern a life: to be, to do, to have. And most people put them in the wrong order.

One option is to live from the standpoint of having: the more I achieve, the more I am worth. This is the logic of LinkedIn, the new car, the apartment bought at 28, the photo at the scenic lookout followed by another photo at another lookout. If you stop, you collapse.

Another option is to live from the standpoint of doing: you cannot stand still. If you aren't producing, you are invisible. It is the trap of the workaholic disguised as a "high performer." You burn out before 30.

And then there is the formula that truly sustains a life: to be + to do = to have. First, you understand who you are. Then, you act in alignment with that. And only then, almost as a byproduct, do the achievements that actually matter arrive. Not the ones that look good on your feed.

Finding your vocation at 25 begins here: stop defining yourself by what you do or what you have accumulated, and dare to look at who you are.

The threshold, according to Higinio Marín

The philosopher Higinio Marín offers an image that is incredibly helpful at this point in life. He says that all human existence is organized around two verbs: to leave and to return. Home is the inside, the safe space, where you are known, where you know who you are. But human beings cannot live only inside. They need to go out. And to go out, you need a threshold—a line that separates the known from the unknown.

At 25, you are exactly there. On the threshold.

Behind you is home: your family, your neighborhood, expectations, the script you were handed. In front of you is the elements: an adult life that no one has fully explained to you, in a world that is mutating every six months. And your temptation will be one of two things: either never leave (stay in the job you hate but know, in the city where you were born, in the version of yourself that reassures everyone) or leave and never return (jump from project to project, from country to country, from identity to identity, without ever building anything).

Both are traps. Vocation is played out in how you cross that threshold.

And here Marín gives another crucial clue. He says that meaning and mission are not played out on a distant horizon, in that "me ten years from now" that they make you visualize in retreats. They are played out in what is right in front of you now. In making this afternoon's conversation the best it can be. In doing this week's project as if it were your last. In conducting the class, the lawsuit, the surgery, the meeting with a difficult client, with an effort that seems disproportionate to the occasion.

Because there, in that disproportionate effort toward the concrete, is where who you are emerges. Not in the ten-year plan. Not in the five-page Sunday journaling. But in the quality with which you enter today into whatever you have to do today.

Three questions worth asking yourself this month

Sir Ken Robinson, the British educator, spoke of something he called the element: that point where what you love doing meets what you are good at. But it was missing a third axis, which is the one TheNomba always adds: what the world needs from you.

Three questions, then. Write them down somewhere you will read them again.

First: what are you doing when time flies by? I don't mean endless scrolling or binge-watching a series. I mean those moments when you were so deep into something that when you looked up, three hours had passed. For a young girl named Gillian Lynn, teachers and parents thought she was "a hopeless, distracted child." Until someone turned on the music. She began to move and couldn't stop. It turned out she wasn't distracted: she was a dancer. She went on to become one of the most famous choreographers in the world. That clue matters. Look for it in yourself.

Second: what are you good at without it having seemed to cost you much? This is important. I don't mean what you have worked incredibly hard at. I mean what is relatively easy for you and not for others. The people around you have been telling you for years, and you don't listen because, since it comes easily to you, you don't value it. Ask them. Seriously. Ask three people who know you well: "What do you think I am good at, even if I don't see it?". Write down the answers. Unfiltered.

Third: what world problem outrages you enough that you want to do something about it? "Everything" doesn't count. You can't tackle everything. Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who accompanied hundreds of people in their final days, wrote a book compiling the five most common regrets of the dying. The first was always the same: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Three concrete world problems that you genuinely care about. Write them down. There is a clue there, too.

This is a path, not a test

There is something it would be honest to tell you before we finish: you are not going to find your vocation by reading this article. Nor by taking a weekend course. Nor with a coach promising "clarity in 21 days."

Vocation is discovered by doing. By trying. By making mistakes. By returning home when necessary and heading out again when your body asks for it. By having honest conversations with people older than you who have lived through things. By reading. By working on real things that serve real people, even if at first they seem too small for someone as special as you thought you were at 22.

At 25, you have an advantage you probably aren't seeing: you still have time to make decisions that are not irreversible. Switch sectors. Start a weekend project. Go back to school. Tell your parents, with affection but with clarity, that the life they expect is not yours.

What you cannot keep doing is living on autopilot, waiting for the answer to come to you by revelation. Revelation is not going to come. What comes are clues. And to see them, you have to stop.

So tonight, before you open Instagram again, try something: close your eyes for one minute. Just that. And ask yourself without traps, without a script, without the voice of your parents or that of the algorithms:

Who am I, really, when no one is watching?

Start there. The rest is the path.