I've found that it's easy to let your life become unfocused after leaving college. Up until graduation, you always had built-in goals on which to focus: pass that test, find scholarships/jobs, graduate, etc...
After graduating and finding a job, I was suddenly without any pressing objectives in my life. What's next? Retirement? That's way too far off (probably). I was working and living my life day-to-day, not unhappy, but sort of drifting without direction.
As cliché as it sounds, trying to answer the question "where do I want to be in 1, 5, 10 years" honestly helped. I thought about it for a while and came up with some vague ideas. Every once in a while, I do a mental progress check and that helps me see past the daily routine to something greater.
For the most of my life having those external "goais" and having to meet them was extremelly painful and frustrating for me.
You would not believe how happy the lack of "objectives" made me. I can just work, have my salary and not be bothered. It's like as you was under cripppling pain for all of your life and then suddently it is relieved forever.
Strange, I found exactly the opposite. I went to industry for a while because I was tired of goal-seeking and working hard all the damn time, but actually being there made me feel pressured as all hell.
What I really should have done was exploit my white male upper-middle class American privilege and travel for a while. After how much I burned myself out finishing undergrad the way I did, my parents were actually quite willing to fund it.
But no, I felt the need to get a job and try to "build an adult life". I had said, "I want my 9-5". I use the scare-quotes because I discovered that short of being married, with a house, with kids or dogs, there's basically no such thing, and any attempt to treat a real job as a 9-5 for funding your social life will inevitably collapse.
Now that I'm "back" in academia on the research-school side (which is, ironically, the stage I was already at by the end of undergrad, mostly), I'm actually a good deal happier. I was also pretty happy with my second industrial job because I got to live where I wanted and work from home, but I actually really like research and feel far more comfortable working hard in pursuit of an achievable goal (publish stuff, write thesis, accumulate credit-points, graduate) rather than just to maintain a hard-working image.
Big Life Lesson: you need to find a lifestyle and environment suited to you, and you also need to take responsibility for how you run your own life. I could easily get sucked back into pathological workaholism like many graduate students, even though I felt crushed by having to keep busy for eight straight hours in an industrial job. The right work environment is one that makes me feel want to put in effort, but I also have to cut myself off and go have fun at some point.
This is one of the biggest things for me post-graduation. My life has recently been so consumed by achieving one big goal. Once it's accomplished, I just kind of wonder..."what's next?" I mean, I have a big interview at a top tech company on Monday and I've got a standing offer at my current job where I can be comfortable, but it's such a big transition to not have some large, looming goal to work toward.
I had a similar experience and judging by other comments it seems pretty common. School is really good for this because it provides both goals and immediate deadlines. You want to graduate and to do that you have to do this assignment for Thursday and that lab for Monday. In engineering school it's particularly bad since you only have to decide on 5 or 10 electives throughout the degree, and there's usually common easy ones a lot of people know about and take. I still struggle with anything that doesn't have a drop-dead date - and it feels like less things in Real Life™ have one than in school. But recognizing the problem is a part of the battle.
After graduating and finding a job, I was suddenly without any pressing objectives in my life. What's next? Retirement? That's way too far off (probably). I was working and living my life day-to-day, not unhappy, but sort of drifting without direction.
As cliché as it sounds, trying to answer the question "where do I want to be in 1, 5, 10 years" honestly helped. I thought about it for a while and came up with some vague ideas. Every once in a while, I do a mental progress check and that helps me see past the daily routine to something greater.