You filled in this blank before you were sure what was left and what was right. You filled the answer in before you lost your first baby tooth. You stumbled over laces you could hardly tie and still had an answer. Now, maybe the answer was astronaut, teacher, or superhero, but you have always had an answer. Our entire childhoods are spent preparing us for our future careers. Maybe it’s the reason high school and college students feel so much pressure to pick the right school, the right major, the right career. Maybe our career-oriented childhoods are doing us harm.
Growing up, teachers asked you to write your answers on pretty colored paper that you’d bring home to your parent(s), who would smile proudly, knowing it would change in two months. Now, you wanted to be a firefighter, next month you’d want to be a rock star. It changed, dependably like the seasons. In middle school, you took the careers tests fairly seriously, contemplating whether you really wanted to be an accountant or an automatic sprinkler installer. Until high school, when you were told you needed to get serious about your future.
So if you weren’t serious before, what was the point of all those questions as a kid? It didn’t hit you until your junior year that you were getting close to that future, getting close to the “growing up” that had always been far enough away to never take seriously. You began freaking out when people stopped asking “What do you want to be when you grow up” and replaced it with “What are you doing after high school? What college are you going to? What do you plan on majoring in?” and some more questions that made you tremble.
And it continues in college. You meet people and they ask three questions, three questions you have found yourself answering in your sleep, “What is your name, where are you from, and what is your major” as if these three things define you. Because of the career-oriented society we live in, you have felt its pressure. You’ve probably broken down and wondered if this is really what you want to do with your life.
The reality is, this struggle is all too common among our generation. Why? Because we’ve been taught that our careers will be the most important thing we do. We’ve been taught that what we do will define us. It doesn’t. We know this, but because it’s what we’ve been taught, there’s an overwhelming pressure to make all of the right decisions career-wise. But we won’t. We can’t. We make mistakes and we’ll continue to do so. We don’t know exactly what our futures have in store, but because of our determination to pick the right career, we’ll end up learning from those mistakes and doing something with our lives. It might not be what we first wanted for ourselves, but our generation is determined to survive, so we will.
