This exercise is actually less about choosing meaningful milestones and more about unchoosing milestones that don’t feel personally meaningful or relevant to you.
Here are a few milestones that may come up as cultural defaults or expectations, whether explicitly stated or assumed and unspoken:
- Get your driver’s license
- Graduate high school
- Graduate university/college
- Go to grad school
- Become a professional <something>
- Get married
- Buy a house
- Have 2 kids
- …etc
If you’re in academia, maybe people are orienting to milestones like:
- Get first major publication
- Get tenure
- Get a Nobel Prize
- …etc
In any case, you didn’t choose these milestones. This exercise is very simple. Start with a blank paper or document, and consciously write down only the milestones that feel personally meaningful to you.
Then consider yourself free from the rest.
Of course, that doesn’t automatically free you from your parents continuing to ask you when you’re going to have kids… but it means you’ve separated out what you care about from what other people expect of you.
Setting down the weight of expectations can feel freeing, and there can also be some sadness or grief in letting go of certain milestones. If so, you may want to visit the exercise on Grieving & Letting Go.