When my friend and opinions editor of this fine paper asked me this question, my initial impulse was to tell her to “go fuck yourself,” but sadly, “going to fuck yourself” isn’t a viable career choice (as it has a terrible 401k plan), so I had to tell her a convoluted answer to a question I myself was puzzled with — what do you want to do?

When we’re young, the answer is simple. I wanted to marry Alisha Keys, my friend Reggi wanted to play dominos and my friend Jaden wanted to be homeless (he thought it was an easy way to make a buck). Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut, a vet or sell crystal meth. The point I’m trying to make is that the notion of a job in a child’s undeveloped mind is not the unsettling reality many of us face today. Society deems that your job is perhaps one of the biggest parts of your identity, and when you are unsure about your job, it feels more like you are unsure about yourself.

This issue, while it feels innate, is a privilege that most humans have never had the pleasure of dealing with. For most of human history, our only job was survival. We had to hunt, endure cold winters, roll around in the dirt, die from small infections and watch the sunset knowing we would do it all again tomorrow. Life, while hard, was simple. There was no choice to make besides the choice to fight and live another day.

In comparison, the next time you go grocery shopping, look at how many options you have for just peanut butter. We have crunchy, kind of crunchy, smooth, semi-smooth and natural, and our options only grow when we consider all the different brands. In other words, you have more options for peanut butter than your ancestors had in their whole lives.

There’s a psychological phenomenon called choice overload, which states that when there are so many options, people, weighed down by the plethora of decisions they have to make, choose none of them all. So, if you went to the peanut butter aisle to buy smooth peanut butter but were confronted with 100 other options, you were more likely to walk away without any type of peanut butter than you would be if there was only one type of peanut butter present.

If you didn’t catch on yet, I’m not talking about peanut butter anymore. Well … technically, I am (I really do love a late-night PB&J), but I’m really speaking about life more generally. We have so many options for what we want to do with our lives that we get overwhelmed at the idea of missing out on one thing while we peruse another. Back in the day, your job was either a hunter or a gatherer. Now, we have jobs that range from shaking ass on TikTok to selling rubber to manufacturers in China.

So next time you’re in the peanut butter section, wondering, “what do I wanna do with my life,” take a deep breath and look around. Notice the fluorescent lights we all hate and think about how many people before you never had the pleasure of experiencing light indoors. Look out into the ugly parking lot and think about how we can travel more in an hour than some people could have traveled their entire lives. Look around at all the peanut butter and think about all the different PB&J’s you can eat. While it may feel unsettling, it’s better than the unsettling feeling of settling for a life you didn’t get to choose.

Eli Klein is a senior majoring in political science.