“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
A familiar question that every high school student has been asked at least once: on first days of school, potentially with a college counselor, and even just in casual conversation about the future. Whether coming from a teacher, or a parent, or another peer, the question holds the same crushing weight of the scary unknown of possibility. For most teens, it is the type of question that dries throats and makes words seem like million pound weights pressing against tongues.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Also known as every high schooler’s worst nightmare of a question, “What do you want to be when you grow up” pastes simplicity over the idea of the future. A finite question that elicits a finite response. A question that holds the implication that to reach a desirable pinnacle of success you must achieve a single entity. That to earn a lifetime of joy and sustained fulfillment is to inhibit a single identity. The question promotes the idea that people exist to do only one thing, rather than encourage the vastness of possibility.
For most high school students, the answer to this question exists in the form of a singular profession, or perhaps even a single emotion. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a musician. I want to be happy.
But what does it really mean to be any of these things? Why can’t we be all of them? Or multiple of them at once? “To be” holds a connotation that conforms to the singular. When we frame this question in a way that asks what we wish to be, we imply that complexity is not an option.
There exists a wide range of mindsets in teens. Some with complete plans for their lives already set out, others that just let life happen, and everything in between and beyond. And while setting a singular path for your life can simulate a guise of security, only looking down this one path will cause yourself to unconsciously build walls between yourself and possibility.
In my junior year of high school, having felt the crushing weight of this question too many times to count, I have been thinking a lot about this idea of what I want to be when I grow up. I am working on accepting the fact that to live is to teeter on the thin line between discovering who you are and discovering your relation to the world. When thinking about what I want to be when I grow up, I also try to also think about what I want to do when I grow up. What impact will my actions have on the people around me? How will I let the opportunities around me shape how I navigate through the world?
My goal is to let all my peers know, all these distraught teenagers contemplating their purpose, that there is no wrong way to approach this concept of the future, and certainly no wrong way to uncover your path. I am aware that I myself have only begun to peel away at the surface of the opportunities that engulf every moment I experience, but also feel that it is never too young to consider the possibility of purpose, and what it means to exist in an individualistic society in which people are at a surplus.
While trying to arrive at the destination of what it is you want to be in life, you may find your seemingly single direction road branching off a variety of paths. You may even encounter a dead end or a detour that forces you to reroute to another path, as almost no one picks the perfect path at first try. And to really discover what you want to do when you grow up is to find ways to make these paths intersect, creating a network of intersecting routes that can simulate an actual sense of being something impactful.
My usual go-to answer to this question is that I want to be a dentist, because I find interest in the subject. But my answer is finite, and seems to place limitations on what I hope to achieve in the future. It does not encompass the fact that when I grow up, I want to someday be able to give back to my community all that I received, that I want to learn to use my resources to help those who may need them more, or that I want to gain a heightened understanding of the role I play in the world. While thinking about how you can answer this question to satisfy the questioning of others, also try and consider how you can make your personal answer to the question more complex, nuanced, and reflective of your complicated values.
What is your go-to answer for what you want to be when you grow up?
