It astounds me that there are genuinely living, breathing people on this planet who believe they have a soulmate.
We need to talk. There is something I have to say to you here and now.
Practically speaking, there is no partner in the world who suits you.
And if you follow that line of thought, there is no profession on the planet that suits you either.
Now, you have two options before you continue reading this. Either you decide I am an idiot, in which case you must stop reading immediately.
Or there is a chance that experience has taught me a thing or two about romantic and professional choices, in which case the frightening implication is that you must stop, here and now, searching for your soulmate and for your ideal profession.
This piece is a little about relationships, a little about careers, but mainly about one of the most poisonous and weakening myths of the modern world: the myth of the match.
Let us start with the obvious. You are a human being, and you are a complex and developing creature.
What does that cliché mean? That there are countless sides to you, which is why you are complex, and that you are constantly changing, which is why you are developing.
You do not need to be a great genius to do the arithmetic and understand that the search for a beloved or a profession that will sit exactly on top of that complexity is, first, idiotic; second, doomed to fail; and third, directs your efforts in the least useful possible direction.
Because the fit is not found. It is built, slowly, by two changing people who keep adjusting to a version of each other that did not exist last year.
Which is far less romantic and enormously more hopeful — because a thing that is built can be built by you, whereas a thing that is found can only be waited for.