Everyone in My Class Seems to Know What They Want — Why Don't I?

In the class WhatsApp group, people are dropping their plans like announcements. JEE Advanced coaching starts next week. She's going to do BCom Hons from SRCC. He's aiming for NIFT. Someone else already has a backup plan — and a backup to the backup. Everyone is talking with a certainty that sounds completely real, completely settled, completely decided.

And you read it and feel something between panic and shame. Because you still don't know. Not really. You have a vague sense of what sounds okay, maybe a subject you like more than the others, but nothing that feels like a direction. Nothing that would hold up as an announcement in that group. And the gap between where they seem to be and where you are feels, in those moments, enormous.

First: most of them don't actually know either

Here's the thing worth sitting with: they know what they're going to do. That is not the same thing as knowing what they want.

Some of them chose based on parental pressure — and they've made peace with it, or they haven't, but either way the choice is made and they're moving. Some chose the "safe" option because uncertainty felt worse than the wrong answer. Some chose what their best friend chose. Some chose based on what sounded impressive at family dinners, because they'd been asked about their plans enough times that just having an answer became more important than having the right one.

Certainty, in this context, is often performance — or just a decision made quickly enough that they've stopped questioning it. The announcement in the WhatsApp group is real. The clarity behind it may not be.

Comparison is lying to you — here's how

You only see the output: the confident announcement, the plan, the name of the college, the coaching centre. You don't see what's behind it. You don't see the doubt that surfaced at 2am last week, then got pushed down. You don't see the resentment slowly building about a choice they're not entirely sure about. You don't see the private conversations with parents that didn't go the way they wanted.

Your experience — the uncertainty, the not-knowing, the sitting with it — is happening on the inside. Their experience is also happening on the inside, just as messily. What you're seeing is the version they've chosen to present. You're comparing your private reality to their public one, and then concluding something is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you.

Why some people decide faster — and what it actually means

Decision speed is not correlated with decision quality. People who decide quickly in uncertain situations are often doing one of two things: they're genuinely less anxious about getting it wrong — meaning the outcome matters less to them, not that they're wiser — or they're deeply anxious and coping by just committing to something. The commitment reduces the anxiety of uncertainty, even if the choice itself isn't well thought through.

Neither of these makes their choice better than one arrived at more slowly with more self-awareness. The person who takes three months to figure out what they actually want and then commits to it thoughtfully is making a better decision than the person who picked something in a panic and called it certainty. The system doesn't reward that, but it's still true.

What "not knowing" might actually be telling you

If you're someone who finds it hard to commit to a direction when you're not sure, that is often a sign of genuine thoughtfulness — not weakness. You're trying to make a real decision rather than a defensive one. You're holding the question open because you sense that it matters and you don't want to get it wrong. That quality will serve you well. Not in the next three months of the group chat, maybe — but over the arc of your life.

The problem is that the system around you doesn't have space for that kind of process. Everyone is supposed to know by now. The forms have deadlines. The coaching centres want deposits. Your parents want to tell the relatives something reassuring. The expectation is that you should have already arrived at certainty, and the fact that you haven't is being read — by you and maybe by others — as a failure.

It isn't a failure. It's a different relationship to the question. And it is worth protecting, even when it's uncomfortable.

If the comparison and the indecision are creating real anxiety — not just the ordinary discomfort of an uncertain decision, but something that is affecting your sleep, your concentration, your ability to function — then that's worth taking seriously. Anxiety has a way of making the uncertainty feel much larger and more dangerous than it actually is. It can collapse the distance between "I don't know what I want yet" and "I am failing at my life." Those are not the same thing, but anxiety can make them feel identical.

Therapy can be a space where your own timing is respected and your internal process has room to breathe — where someone helps you separate what you actually think from what you've absorbed from everyone around you, and where uncertainty is treated as information rather than a problem to be solved urgently. If that sounds useful, you can reach out on WhatsApp: wa.me/919560067620. No forms, no commitment — just a conversation.

Try: What's Actually True? — what do you actually know vs what are you assuming? Try: Clouds & Thoughts — watch the comparison thoughts without letting them stick Take the free anxiety screening — 3 minutes