We spend a minimum of 16 years of school trying our best to answer that question.
John Lennon once said that what he wanted to be was happy; and when his teachers told him that he did not understand the
assignment, he replied that they did not understand life. Last time I checked, you can’t buy an average $30,000 car with
happiness. Nor can you buy a house, food for your kids, college -- the list, of course, is endless.
It
was easy for John Lennon to say that all he wanted was to be is happy when he grew
up, because he was only five years old when he said it. He hadn’t
been through the stress of applying to colleges or the struggles of paying for
it along with monthly rent, daily meals and laundry. Nor had he been through the anxiety high schoolers face when they take advanced
college-level classes, or volunteer several hours of their time for community
service so they can stand out above the crowd when college admissions offices
review their applications. He hadn’t even experienced the first love of his
life that makes us all ponder about and plan for the
future. It is experiences like these that make answering the question, “What do
you want to be when you grow up?” so difficult.
We want to believe the people who tell us that if we chase our dreams we can never go wrong, or that money can’t buy happiness so we shouldn’t worry too much about our future occupations. But, we can’t when life has shown us what happens to the people who chase their dreams and fail or the people who don’t make enough money.
The heartbreak of failure, the fear of not being good enough to succeed, and the tremendous stress of not having enough money, nowadays, outweigh the desire to merely strive to be happy.
Two more years before I graduate -- approximately 24 months, 36 weeks, 730 days of college life left before I grow up and start
living in the “real world”. Approximately 17,531 hours, 1,051,200 minutes before I have to decide how to answer that question. With
every month, week, day, hour and minute that silently slips by, I grow more and more terrified because I
have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.
Friends around
me seem to have no idea, either, what they want to be, and the more I ask other
college students that same question, the more I come to realize that none of us
really have any idea what we want to do with our futures. Like paper
boats set down on a beach by the shoreline, we are powerless against the
tide of life carrying us off into the distant sea of the future.
What I’ve come to realize, is that maybe the problem in our inability to answer the question isn’t because of us, but because of the
question itself. Perhaps the question should be, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Hope lies in shifting the
focus of questioning from our being to our ability to take
action, our opportunity and our potential to mold our fear of a shapeless future into a masterpiece of our design.
Although I can’t
help you answer the question of what you want to do when you grow up, for the
question is yours alone to answer, I can tell you this: you are not alone in
your fears and doubts. You are not alone in the frightening thoughts of the future that you hide during the day, but that come out of hiding from your
subconscious at 2:30 am. Know that we are all in the same boat swept out to sea, and the best we can do is focus on the little things that
make the here and now worth abandoning fear of the future.
Embrace the thrill in the pursuit of finding someone we
want to spend the rest of our lives with; the fact that we are young and can do
anything, and everything, we set our minds to, because in this fleeting moment
we are infinite.