What if you don’t know what comes next?

This week, thousands of 16-year-olds will be opening their GCSE results and being asked a question that I remember very well:

What are you going to do next?

At 16, I really didn’t know.

I knew what subjects I liked. I knew what I was reasonably good at. I probably had some vague ideas about what I might do one day. But did I have a carefully thought-out plan for my working life? Absolutely not.

And looking back, how could I?

At 16, you simply don’t know enough yet. You haven’t experienced the world of work. You don’t know what you’ll be good at, what you’ll enjoy, what opportunities will come your way or what life will throw at you.

So you make the best decision you can with what you know at the time. You choose A levels, college, an apprenticeship or something else. And then you take the next step.

It struck me recently how similar that feeling can be in midlife.

Because in our 40s and 50s, many of us find ourselves asking that same question again:

What am I going to do next?

Except this time, it can feel much harder to admit that we don’t know.

By midlife, we’re supposed to have it sorted. We’ve built careers, gained experience, earned money, raised families and dealt with all sorts of things that our 16-year-old selves couldn’t possibly have imagined.

And yet you can still reach a point where the future feels surprisingly uncertain.

Maybe you’ve been made redundant and suddenly have to think about work in a way you haven’t for years. Perhaps your children are older and the job that fitted around family life no longer feels right. You might have spent years doing something you’re very good at but have reached the point where you simply don’t want to do it for another ten or fifteen years.

Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all. You just have a nagging feeling that you want something different.

That can be unsettling.

At 16, not knowing what comes next is expected. At 45, 50 or 55, we can interpret the same uncertainty as somehow having lost our way.

But I don’t think that’s what it means.

The difference between us and our 16-year-old selves is that this time we have something incredibly useful to work with: experience.

We know much more about ourselves. We know the environments in which we thrive and the ones that make us miserable. We know what we're good at, even if we sometimes need reminding. We know what we're no longer prepared to put up with. And, importantly, we have a much better idea of what we want our lives to look like outside work.

The question isn't necessarily “What career should I have now?”

It might be: “What kind of working life would fit the person I am now?”

That opens up a much bigger conversation.

It might mean another job. But it could also mean working for yourself, freelancing, consulting, retraining, combining different kinds of work or doing something you haven't considered before.

You don't need to have the answer before you start thinking about it.

Just as those 16-year-olds opening their results this week aren't choosing the rest of their lives, neither are we.

Sometimes you only need to work out the next step.

And perhaps we could give ourselves a little of the same understanding we'd give a 16-year-old standing at the beginning of something new: you don't have to know exactly where you're going yet.

You just need somewhere to start.