Forget soul-searching and wanderlust — can’t a girl be content with her boring life?

Somewhere in the past few years, taking time to soul-search became more aspirational that buckling down and committing to something you know you can be content with — but there’s a problem with that: Some of us just aren’t capable of it. It’s not the way we’re hardwired, and the weird, backwards stigma that comes along with it isn’t fun.

It happens in your early 20s. People start sharing toothy selfies on Facebook about what they’ve decided to do with the rest of their lives — “I’m SO happy to announce . . .” — and friends, and friends of friends congratulate them, all the while growing more and more eager about their own impending Big Life Decisions.

But what didn’t seem to surface until more recently are the ones beginning with “I’m going to spend the next year traveling,” or “I decided to take some time for myself,” statuses. Everything that had been ingrained in us so far seemed to point in the opposite direction, but heck, we used to be told we needed algebra in real life too.

Suddenly it was like everything everyone wanted was changing, and us skeptics were being left behind in the dust-storm of our crusty “workaholic” ways.

Friends who had been previously happy in their careers for months — years even — began whispering to us about how they were considering “making the big move,” and by “making the big move” I mean totally quitting in search of something more fulfilling.

They just “weren’t sure what it was” yet.

“Shit,” we thought, “We’ve really read this whole adult thing wrong.” We started feeling foolish. When people asked about future plans we’d brush them off like we didn’t know yet. “Traveling the world” sounded a lot cooler than whatever we were doing, even if what we were doing was fulfilling and fun. We found ourselves thrust into a flurry of uncertainty, no longer sure of anything.

“How do you know if you don’t go out and see the world first?” they’d say. “What if in 10 years you look back and realize you’ve wasted years of your life doing something you didn’t truly love?”

Now I don’t know what “love” has to do with work, but I personally found myself genuinely considering what they were saying — wrapped up into the wanderlust phenomenon that seemed to be sweeping the millennial nation. So one Sunday I tried it — I tried “soul-searching”, and now I know I was right.

I imagined myself out, dancing in a desert with a flower crown on, smiling to strangers as they passed by, and spending my nights in a tent next to another stranger I’d agreed to an open but deeply emotional relationship with. And then I imagined it raining, and I remembered that I shy away from the rain even when I have a raincoat and an umbrella. I imagined having to find and cook food for myself — not a bodega in sight — and a chill ran down my spine, straight to the very bone.

Ten minutes of sitting under a tree, and five minutes of deep, deep contemplation later, I realized I wasn’t cut out for the gypsy life. Some people aren’t.

I grabbed my iPhone, my Kindle, my headphones, my Fitbit and I hit the road — a road full of cars and other non-gypsies, like me, headed to our shitty 9-5 jobs.

@carolinephinney