There’s a quote that always lands with a bit of thunder: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” It’s usually shared with a knowing smile and a shrug, but behind it lies a
radical truth — that life often has plans for us that render our own blueprints naive at best and self-sabotaging at worst.
In a culture obsessed with control, metrics, and five-year plans, the idea of living without goals sounds like heresy. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s wisdom — deep, timeless wisdom — asking us to surrender, not out of weakness, but out of profound alignment with something greater than our individual agendas.
The Trap of the Five-Year Plan
We’ve all been asked it: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
It sounds like a reasonable question. It invites vision, ambition, forward thinking. But hidden inside is the assumption that life will cooperate, that we are the primary authors of our future, that uncertainty is something to be tamed.
But life isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a storm. A wave. A breath. A heartbreak. A miracle.
The five-year question freezes the infinite fluidity of becoming into a rigid snapshot. It narrows the path to a single outcome, often shaped more by fear than intuition. In truth, most of us don’t know what we truly want. What we often envision is not purpose — it’s protection. A job that secures us. A partner who won’t leave. A location that soothes us. But clarity doesn’t come from projecting into the future. It comes from fully being where we are now.
The Pitfall of Manifestation
In recent years, “manifesting” has become a spiritual buzzword. Visualize. Attract. Align.
But here’s the catch: much of what we try to manifest comes from a place of lack, not love. We visualize because we’re afraid. We dream because we’re dissatisfied. We set intentions not from a full heart, but from a hungry one. So we chase shadows — jobs we think will complete us, relationships we think will fix us, homes we think will finally make us feel rooted.
Instead of leading life, we try to dominate it. Coerce it into delivering our desires.
But what if the most powerful act is not to manifest what we think we want, but to get out of the way and let life show us what we’re really here for?
Let Life Lead
We are taught to lead, to direct, to command. But what if the deepest wisdom lies in listening?
Imagine life as a river, not a staircase. It doesn’t climb upward in clear, logical steps — it flows, meanders, floods, evaporates, and rains back down again. Goals are the dams we try to build to control it. And yet the river always finds a way.
When we let life lead, we surrender to something ancient, intelligent, and far more compassionate than our egos. We stop trying to engineer our path and start trusting the invitations that show up. The synchronicities. The heartbreaks. The sudden turns. We stop resisting the discomfort of the unknown, and we begin to trust that every phase — even the painful ones — is essential.
The Hero’s Journey and the Phases We Cannot Skip
Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey offers a timeless map of what it means to be human. We all, at some point, hear the call to adventure. We all resist it. We all cross thresholds, meet mentors, confront demons, face death and rebirth, and return home transformed.
❥ The truth is: we cannot skip phases. We cannot bypass the dark forest or fast-forward to the triumph. Life will take us through the stages — ego, loss, despair, awakening — whether we plan for them or not.
The mistake isn’t entering a difficult phase. The mistake is getting stuck there. When we resist what life is showing us, when we cling to a false identity or avoid the deeper lesson of a moment, we stagnate. The energy gets blocked. Growth stalls.
But if we read the room — the energy, the timing, the emotional climate — we can learn what the moment is asking of us. We can move with it, not against it. And in doing so, we emerge. Changed. Wiser. Marked by the journey, but no longer defined by the suffering.
A Full-Spectrum Life
To live without goals is not to live passively. It’s to live presently. It’s to be radically open to life as it comes, to let joy and grief, clarity and confusion, success and failure all have their rightful place.
A full life isn’t just the Instagram-worthy highlight reel. It’s the nights of doubt. The friendships that break. The years of wandering. The scars. The surrender.
And yet, somehow, we are fully equipped for it. We can survive it all — not unmarked, but unharmed in spirit. We carry the wisdom in our eyes, the lines in our faces, the quiet radiation of
someone who has said yes to all of it. Who didn’t skip chapters. Who let life carve the soul into something real.
Juno Burger
www.junoburger.com