Why do I need a five year plan? 💌

Notes on taking the scenic route.

‘I’ll meet my husband at 19. We’ll be married by the time I’m 24, and have two children by the time I’m 27.’

It was a Year 9 geography class. The year was 2000; we’d all survived the millennium bug. We had a substitute teacher that day, and the kindly woman in question had absolutely no hope of controlling this teenage group of unknowns and their hormones. The conversation on my side of the classroom had moved way beyond sedimentary rock, and it was my turn to reveal the timeline for my life.

From both the boys and the girls, the marriage/babies question had not been an ‘if’. It was simply a matter of ‘when’. And at the ripe old age of 14, I had a plan. Becoming a wife at 24 seemed late, if anything. Five more years of being single! A whole decade before marriage! It was practically an eternity.

But here I am, aged 37 and as of yet, no marriage nor children to speak of. Am I a failure for dishonouring teenage Jenny so spectacularly? Of course not. Not least because she didn’t know what it meant to be a teenager, let alone an adult or a parent. 

I’m absolutely not in any way against them. I don’t sit here hardened and bitter - quite the opposite. I love, have loved and will again love the building and honouring of a team, with a view to riding the adventure of life together. I am awe of the relationships and the families my friends have built, some from their early 20s. But the subject of our chat that day is demonstrative of just two of the many narratives I and my classmates had been thoroughly fed before we’d barely hit puberty. 

I am however SO glad I didn’t stick to the plan I declared for myself aged 14. Although to be fair the guy I was dating at 19 was a good one - hi Dan, if you’re reading this. But to this day, people KEEP asking me where I see myself in five years’ time, and I can’t stand this pressure to strive for a future none of us can actually predict. When I was handed the question last week as an ice breaker at a networking event, I was reminded of the conversation in that classroom some 23 years ago, as well as being asked the question in multiple job interviews in the intervening years.

Of course, having a sense of direction is great. Having goals is great. Wanting to progress is great. I may have done a little travelling, but I don’t believe in Peter Pan-ing your way through life, rolling around on beaches for eternity, drifting between chakra clearing and chanting sessions, shirking any form of responsibility or contribution to this world.

But I’m calling bullshit on the five year plan. Because on the whole, I think it’s more limiting than it is helpful. It sets you up for a perceived sense of failure by default because infamously, life is what happens when you are busy making other (five year) plans. 

Why then, are we so fixated on them?

It’s well documented that your 20s is a tough decade. At the age of 16, when the rigid structures of compulsory education end, we are unleashed from the geography classrooms and out of the school gates. From that point on life, or certainly the timelines of our lives, can never again be predicted with such certainty. Our paths begin to differ wildly, but as that classroom chat illustrates, the expectations are already very much set, or at least they were in the year 2000. 

So what I did have to cling to was the expectation of where I was supposed to be in relation to The Plan that had been made for me. And clung I did, so susceptible to these societal messages and the pressure to conform. Out in the big wide world, our 20s see us floundering as we try to figure it out all out in some weird unspoken dash to hit these milestones - this supermarket sweep of credit-based wealth and security. I gratefully found a career path, and flung myself headfirst into making it work financially as quickly as possible, hanging onto that first rung of the ladder for dear life through the recession as I gradually pulled myself up. Get the job, get the partner, get the house, get the car, sit down on the sofa (0% APR for five years) and complete Netflix for the rest of your days.

It sounded really good. It sounded safe, and fun, and cosy. I wanted all of it. I actually got all of it, and not because it was part of a five year plan. I still want most of it. But in my hurry, I didn’t stop to ask myself why I wanted any of it. I didn’t really consider how having it was supposed to feel.

Ultimately, in my 37 years of experience, the BEST of life is found on the periphery. It’s in having the curiosity to look outside the trajectory that either society, or you, or society disguised as you, has set. It’s in the whispers and the what ifs and why nots.

How can you f*ck around and find out if you’ve got a Q2 quota of Jones’s to keep up with, most of whom you tolerate at best, much less actually like?

To me, the five year plan is a deadline to attain the things you at that particular point in time perceives you want to attain. But the five years older you - the one that you’re yet to meet - may not want the same things.

They’re also likely capable of things you can’t even comprehend right now. 14-year-old Jenny would have fainted flat on that chalky classroom floor if she knew she would go on to work on the UK’s biggest radio station, on national news platforms, or the biggest entertainment TV Instagram account in the world. Instagram wouldn’t even exist for another 10 years. She certainly couldn’t have conceived the idea of travelling the world solo. 

These wild ideas would have never been in her plan, because they were absolutely unthinkable to that too-talkative teenager from a small town whose parents hadn’t been to university, been able to head off around the world, or had the opportunity to chase the bright lights of a TV set. They worked hard within the framework they had been shown, and did an amazing job. At 14, of course my world of possibility was based on what I could see had already been achieved.

But moving through life and gaining experience, memories, connection, big small and small big adventure - it shapes us. It exposes us to ideas and people and things we cannot possibly know exist yet. It expands our edges and increases our capacity for what’s possible if we, intentionally or otherwise, take a more scenic route.

And what an incredible thought that is. 

My criteria for my goals looks different to the house, car, job title. Those goals for me have and will come as a result of alternative, broader goals that in my mind are far more luxurious, especially once I ensured I could meet my own basic needs.

Slow mornings. High quality food. Daily sunshine as a guarantee. Time autonomy. Room to prioritise my health. The ability to set boundaries. Physical strength for longevity. Adventure. Emotional resilience. Tranquility. Deep conversations. Quality connections. 

I often need to remind myself how rich I am, when the comparison trap comes calling because by the above criteria, I’m loaded beyond my wildest dreams. 

And it was the glimmers outside of the plan that led me to these riches. It was being willing to step outside of the path I was on to see what the side roads had to offer. When I quit my shiny staff job at the BBC, split up with my boyfriend of four years and left our flat as I turned 30, I didn’t know what my life would look like in the following weeks or months, let alone in five years’ time. But I knew I wanted to bring myself back to life. I knew I wanted to reignite certain things I’d left behind as I got caught up in the illusion. The lights were on in the TV studio at least, but I was nowhere to be found, and I knew I couldn’t be found in paid holiday leave or a trust-less relationship.

My career trajectory and my salary both increased when I went freelance - more proof of the glimmers outside of the plan that involved a very stable pension and maternity pay I no longer have. But it also took a back seat when I eventually left London with my life - and my career - in a suitcase four years later. I stopped climbing up the rankings in the credits of the TV shows I was working on while I climbed volcanoes in Guatemala, sand dunes in Peru, boats in the Philippines and mopeds in Vietnam, eventually leading myself to Barcelona, career very much intact. But I wouldn’t have done any of it if I’d created a five year plan in my early 30s, because there wouldn’t have been room to say yes to things I’d never comprehended until I started literally putting one foot in front of the other across the world.

Do I now earn less than my peers in the industry? Yes. Could I have earned more if I’d stuck to The Plan That Never Was? Probably. Do I care? Beyond knowing that I can pay my own way, not really. Abundance comes in many forms, and what I’ve created is the most rock steady foundation of a life by design. I’ll never know what any of the possible alternatives would have looked like, but I do know I’d still be making less and less realistic plans to leave if I’d stayed; plotting far-flung trips in the small hours when I couldn’t sleep, dreaming of simply slowing the hell down long enough to get off the hamster wheel and take a breath.

People laugh when I say I’m following a feeling, but I followed it around the world until I found my home. I follow it in dating, evading yet more questions from concerned family members every time I fail to bring a plus one to the wedding/birthday/hamster’s funeral. But following a feeling, rather than a trajectory or an idea of what my life should look like has rarely, if ever, led me astray. On the contrary, ignoring the gnawing in my gut to keep up the idea of a ‘successful’ life has led me woefully wrong. Your head is important. Logic, rationale, not being reckless - it’s all important. But it can’t account for the truth of how you feel, regardless of The Plan. 

Life doesn’t look like what I thought it would five years ago. But it’s full of so many things I’m sure 14-year-old Jenny’s vision couldn’t have brought me. So while I have no idea what life will look like five years from now, I’m ok with not knowing. Because experience has taught me that I’ll be able to adapt to whatever life throws at me, and that I’ll find some glimmers in the inevitable tough moments. I intend to stay curious; because it is ultimately curiosity that has built me this life, with these memories. A life that instead of being focused on other people’s perceptions of what I should be doing, is instead focused entirely on how I want to feel, which will outlast any five year plan I could possibly make. 

Have a path, sure. Find a true north, and use it as your guiding light.

But make sure to leave room for the occasional detour, because there’s so much to be found along the way. And you never know where those roads might lead you.