When you want cake, but you can't work out what kind of cake you want

So I'm in a cake shop, let's for arguments sake call it 'Life'. I'm looking around. There are many delights before my eyes. Pain au chocolat. Oui. Scones with clotted cream and homemade strawberry jam. Two please. Pastries. Cheesecake. Banana bread. Raspberry and chocolate muffins. Bigger than your head jam biscuits. It's amazing. And then the worst thing hits. I can't decide what I want. I look around for ages. I annoy the shopkeeper (me) and then leave the store empty handed, hungry and perhaps a little over stimulated by the whole experience.

My mum worked for 27 years in the same job, at the same school. She didn't complain and as far as I know, she was happy and didn't want anything else because she always made the best of what she had. And then there's dad. He's done the same thing for the best part of 40 years, give or take some entrepreneurial moments that none of us can quite work out. But their generation committed. They chose that one thing and made it work. And then came us. We flit from one thing to another, believing, from fuck knows where, that we're entitled. Entitled to everything. And that's why I think so many of us are lost. We've grown up believing that the world is ours. And sure, it is, but when you've got the notion of choice, it's really hard to settle on one thing.

When I started at my first job, I was the office co-ordinator. Which is just a bullshit way to say receptionist. I hated it. I lasted 6 weeks because a. I dislike answering phones and b. I hated being perceived as being at 'the bottom'. So I quit that job and went to another, one I thought was more worthy of a university graduate. I believed after 3 years of a joke of a degree, I was entitled to more than being a lacky. Yes, you have to start somewhere, but exactly where was questionable to the 21 year old me.

So now, again, 7 years later, I, like many of my friends, are thinking we're entitled to more. But it's in a less selfish way than when we started out. We know there's something better out there for us but we don't know what. We don't want to start over, but we want more. We've spent longer than our parents ever got to, running around life, blindfolded, trying to work out who we are and what we want. And in many ways, that's a good thing. However, when you begin to work yourself out, and your oyster of a world begins to get smaller, you really want to make sure you're filling it with the right things. And that's hard.