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.