How Do I Know What to Do With My Life? Where You Are Needed

How do I know what to do with my life? Philosopher Gwendolin Kirchhoff answers by turning the direction of the question around: you find out from the need of whatever you serve, not from searching inside yourself. She put it in a single sentence on Laurens Dillmann’s German-language podcast Durch den Nebel (“Through the Fog”):

She adds straight away: “And from nothing else.” And then: “You cannot generate it out of yourself.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:24:14, transl.) That is an unusual answer to a question almost everyone asks inward, of their own wishes, talents and passions. Most advice on how to figure out what you want to do in life starts with self-discovery: journaling, a quiz, your personal values, a list of the things that excite you and bring you joy, then small steps toward a career path or a career change. Kirchhoff offers no method for looking inside. She does not promise to help you figure out what you truly want. She offers a counter-question. This essay follows her thought through the conversation where it came up: from that counter-question, through the Chinese philosopher Mencius and his distinction between the small and the great in a person, to the question of how anyone finds their place.

#Is it normal not to know what to do with your life?

It is completely normal not to know what to do with your life: you are not the only one facing the question, and not knowing is not a personal defect. That is this essay’s reading, not something Gwendolin Kirchhoff said about not knowing. In her conversation with Laurens Dillmann she speaks of something more basic: every person is entangled in what they have inherited from their ancestors, in the movements of their collective and in the demands of the civilisation in which they have to make a living, and has to orient themselves somehow within all this and direct their will, attention and life force (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:18:50–00:19:55). Of that task she says: “That is something that concerns all of us.” (00:19:56, transl.) Feeling a little lost about your path in life, or not yet knowing what you want out of life, is therefore not proof that something is wrong with you.

What her view does suggest is that the painful not-knowing may be a sign of where the answer is being sought. If clarity really cannot be generated out of yourself, then staring harder at your own preferences will not produce it. The long lists of strengths, values and dream jobs that fill the usual guides are not useless, but they all point the same way: inward. Kirchhoff points the other way, and she sums up the direction in a short sentence: “Looking outward is the solution.” (00:24:42, transl.)

This also changes what the question feels like. As long as it is a question about you alone, every option weighs the same and none can be ruled out. Once it becomes a question about someone or something outside you, the options start to sort themselves.

#How do I figure out what to do with my life if I don’t know what I want?

If you don’t know what you want, Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s way to figure out what to do with your life is to reframe the question. Ask not What do I want? but What need am I answering? She put exactly that question to her host, Laurens Dillmann, when the conversation turned to his own work: “What need are you answering, then?” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:22:50, transl.) When he asked what she meant, she widened it into a question for anyone: “The question is, what is your contribution to the whole process?” (00:23:34, transl.)

She makes it concrete with the simplest case there is (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:23:38). If you have a family to feed, you do not spend long wondering what to do. Small beings need somewhere to live, they need to be fed every day, resources have to be brought in, and you have to think about what comes from the children themselves and what you will teach them. Out of those needs, out of what life demands of you, clarity arises. Few people in that situation look for it in a personality test.

That is the core of her answer to how you know what to do with your life. On this view you do not have to get clear first and act later; clarity often comes out of the need you are responding to.

#Why doesn’t looking inward tell you what to do with your life?

Looking inward for what you yourself want does little to tell you what to do with your life, if you take Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s sentence seriously. It looks for clarity in the one place where, on her account, clarity does not arise. The case for following your passions deserves to be heard first, and in its strongest form. Someone who has lived for years by other people’s expectations has to learn again what fits them before they can feel fulfilled. Work that is nothing but obligation, with nothing in it that moves a person, rarely carries a whole life. Searching for what is your own is not vanity.

Kirchhoff’s sentence moves the measure all the same. If you only ask the question from your own side, your work becomes something you do for yourself: you want to be seen in a certain role instead of asking what other people need (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:24:17). Her counterpoint is brief:

“We work and live for others. Our being is defined from the outside in.” (00:22:58, transl.) The sentence is about a person’s place among other people. It does not describe how a living being grows; for the organic, her thinking runs in the opposite direction, self-organisation from within, as the lexicon entry on entelechy explains.

Behind this lies an observation she makes explicitly about therapy culture: that “people identify very strongly with childlike parts, with receiving” (00:23:14, transl.). She does not dismiss this. She grants it first: “that has its rightness too, because some of it was lost.” (00:23:19, transl.) But someone who only receives finds no answer inside to the question of what they should give. How philosophical accompaniment and therapy relate to each other is set out in more detail in Consulting vs. Therapy.

#What does it mean to follow the greater part of yourself?

To follow the greater part of yourself means, for Gwendolin Kirchhoff, identifying not with the child you once were but with the stature you set out with. She names this as the shadow side of therapy culture: people identify with their past and the child within, “instead of identifying with their greatness, the one you set out to be.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:52:23, transl.) Just before, she credits therapy culture with real value: in therapy groups especially, people can experience a great deal of contact and connection that is otherwise missing (cf. 00:51:32). The love for the child one was stays; what matters to her is the direction in which a person understands themselves (cf. 00:52:51).

For this direction she reaches for a line from the Chinese tradition: “That wonderful saying of Mencius: whoever follows the small in himself becomes small.” And: “Whoever follows the great in himself becomes great.” (00:52:57, transl.) In Mencius the saying comes from a teaching dialogue. A disciple asks how it can be that all are equally human and yet some become great and others small. In Richard Wilhelm’s German translation the answer reads:

Mencius does not explain the difference by talent. The senses, he says, are carried away by what is sensual when thinking is absent, and he concludes: “If we first make the higher in us firm, the lower cannot rob us of it.” (Mengzi, transl. Wilhelm, 1916, VI A, 15; English from the German) The great is not an achievement for him but something one follows, because both the great and the small are given to a person.

How this distinction works in conversation shows in a counter-question Kirchhoff put to her host when he spoke about his own goal: “Why do you think of yourself as a child, and why don’t you think of yourself from the goal?” (00:20:38, transl.) The question takes nothing away. It opens a second direction of view, and in it the question of this essay changes. Someone who thinks from the goal no longer asks only what they lack but what they can contribute. In the same passage Kirchhoff describes the great one as someone who brings a field of their own into the world and is needed here for something (cf. 00:52:37).

#How do I find my place in life?

You find your place in life, according to Gwendolin Kirchhoff, through what you are needed for: “We actually come to know our place through what we are needed for.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:58:34, transl.) A place is not invented, and it is not earned alone. It forms within a social organism that, as a rule, begins around individuals and communicates itself to them; through it a person receives their place and what they will do there (cf. 00:57:38).

As an example she offers an observation she marks as her own view: many people like to stay at university for a long time because they find a kind of mini-society there, with places and orders (cf. 00:57:58).

German philosophy knows a related demand, though phrased as duty. In 1794 Johann Gottlieb Fichte observed that a person is born into society and finds much already done that he would otherwise have had to do himself; from this he concludes: “he must occupy his place” (Fichte, 1794, Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten, Third Lecture, transl.). Where Fichte sees a debt owed to society, Kirchhoff describes an experience: your place shows itself where you are needed.

#What does love have to do with knowing what to do with your life?

Love tells you, according to Gwendolin Kirchhoff, which direction you are drawn in: toward what you find beautiful and where you are pulled of your own accord. In the same conversation with Laurens Dillmann she gives this second answer to the question of direction in life, set out in full in the lexicon entry Follow Beauty. She locates the direction “there, where your natural motivation to love flows.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Durch den Nebel, 00:46:09, transl.)

At first glance this seems to contradict her first answer. If clarity comes from the need of others, why follow your own love? Read together, as this essay’s reading rather than a formula of hers, the two answers complete each other: love shows the direction a person is drawn in; the need of whatever they serve gives that direction a concrete shape. Kirchhoff sets her maxim explicitly against the popular formula of following your own bliss, which she finds “hardly fitting” (00:46:00, transl.); the measure is not your own state but what your love is directed toward.

For the question of how you know what to do with your life, this means the answer lies neither only in you nor only with others. It lies where what you love meets something that is needed. What follows from that love is not fixed in advance. It may be a profession, a task within a community, or responsibility for people who depend on you.

#How is this different from a meaning crisis or feeling lost?

The question of what to do with your life is a question about action, and that sets it apart from a meaning crisis, a life crisis and disorientation. It does not ask whether life has meaning, or why something has broken, but what you should actually do. The related essays on this site take up the neighbouring questions:

These questions overlap. Someone standing in the fog can hardly ask about their contribution. For that state, Kirchhoff described in the same conversation where she would begin: with what a person who feels lost in the fog is already looking at; the essay on disorientation gives that passage in full. And if not knowing turns into lasting despair or hopelessness, a philosophical conversation is not the first place to turn, but medical or therapeutic help. In an acute crisis in Germany you can reach the Telefonseelsorge around the clock at 0800 111 0 111, or dial 112; elsewhere, contact your local emergency number.

#What changes when the question turns around?

When the question turns around, no finished answer remains, but a direction does: away from searching for what you want, toward what is needed around you and where your love already flows. That is less dramatic than a decision about a whole life, and at the same time more binding. Kirchhoff’s sentence does not ask you to give yourself up. It asks for a way of looking that takes the other seriously, and for trust that clarity arrives where you begin to respond.

The next steps are small: an observation rather than a plan. Where are you already needed today, without calling it a contribution? Where does your attention go when nobody expects anything of you? And what greatness in you is waiting for you to follow it, rather than to earn it first? In Mencius it is already given.

#Sources

• Fichte, J. G. (1794). Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten [Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation]. Third Lecture.
• Kirchhoff, G. in conversation with L. Dillmann (2026). „Folge der Schönheit“ - Philosophin Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Beziehungen als Weg aus dem Nebel [Video, German]. Durch den Nebel, YouTube, 30 August 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxKGk3bXeA (quotes and paraphrases 00:18:50–00:24:42, 00:46:00–00:46:09, 00:51:32–00:58:34, translated).
• Mengzi (1916). Mong Dsï: Die Lehrgespräche des Meisters Meng K’o. Trans. Richard Wilhelm. Book VI A, 15 (English rendering from the German).