Lately, I’ve found myself repeating the same phrases over and over again. I’m impressed with my friends’ ability to handle it, to be honest. Then again, they seem to repeat their own versions of my mantra also. Maybe most of us are caught in this rut and can’t break free yet.

For me, the go-to topic is my plan to get a full-time job and start my life. My problem is that I spend so much time thinking and talking about this plan that I sometimes forget to live in the moment. The question is: why do I and so many of my friends feel the need to remind ourselves and others of our plans? My personal answer is that when progress seems slow, I need a way to justify my current course.

Once I graduated from college, life seemed intimidating. I always imagined myself getting a fulltime job working 40 hours a week, having health insurance and the rest of the works. Luckily, my dad was willing to talk to some people he knew and try to find me one of those jobs. I didn’t want just any job, though. A job needed to fulfill and reward me creatively and mentally for me to take it.

Since, other than student loans, I didn’t have any immediate debt, I chose to take my time with a job search. Although I studied public policy, I wanted to do something with more of a journalistic tinge. Though I had some experience, I wasn’t able to land any interviews until a friend let me know his radio station was looking for part time help.

My parent’s preferred I had a fulltime job and it so happened that I received an offer from a campaign around the same time I went through the interview process for the radio job. A year later, I know I made the right choice by going with radio instead of campaigning.

At the time, I had a plan set out for myself where I would work between my two minimum wage jobs (I also work at a restaurant) while I build professional communications experience. So here I am, a year later and my plan is soon coming to fruition.

All that’s left, though, is what’s next?

It’s not just myself in this situation. As I noted a lot of my friends currently find themselves in a similar place. We feel like we need to start planning for our future, we need to have benefits, vacation days and all those other nice parts that we deserve as productive members of society. That search, to figure out what we want to do when we grow up, takes its toll.

We’re young people. In our early 20s, we easily have a whole world ahead of us and still choose to obsess over the future rather than live in the moment. Life revolves around the next step. Somehow, in a backwards kind of way, talking about it feels like a way we can break free of our dependency on it.

For sure, the next step will come when it’s time is right. Until then, it’s a matter of keeping everyone off our backs. Insecurity keeps us from escaping the next step here. To not succeed in the next step means failure and defeat. It means our parents were right. It means grinding through exhaustion yielded nothing. Worse, it means we’ve wasted our time following our dreams.

I can’t speak for my friends here or other youngsters in my position. I can say, however, repeating the plan feels like a safety blanket. If I repeat it enough times, it will become true. Maybe I need to repeat it because I don’t trust myself enough to succeed. That could be true for more than just me.

Insecurity and pressure contribute to this loop and cloud out all the joy of the now. To break out, we need to understand the value of self-confidence. That’s hard.