How Culture Destroys Us From A Young Age
What do you want to be when you grow up? This single question ruins our perception of life from a young age.
How can an innocent question be so destructive?
The Culture of Lost
It might be your friend. It might be you. Some people have no idea what they want to do in life, but instead of treating it like a fun quest, they consider it a failure.
Reaching adulthood with no idea what you want to do became a bad thing.
We’re conditioned since we’re little kids to have one purpose in life. And it’s wrong. Most of us have far more interests than what we do during our work or free time.
Yet, we’re asked what we want to pursue when we are small children as if it’s the end goal for us.
But it isn’t.
It can be multiple goals. The question seems harmless but perhaps we should rephrase it as “What do you want to do when you grow up?”. It’s a subtle change that opens up the answers from a single-purpose thought process to one of multi-interests.
A kid doesn’t want to just be an Astronaut. He wants to be in space. She wants to heal people. They want to cook. A doctor astronaut who loves cooking sounds more well-rounded and real because it encompasses everything the kid likes.
Children have imagination and we need to let them spread their wings. If we think of life as multi-purpose from a young age, then we wouldn’t be so hard on ourselves if we hadn’t found our one single objective in life.
But this isn’t reality. So how do we fix it?
Instead of fixating on the idea we must find the one and only purpose in life, we need to focus on trying things that interest us. You don’t need blazing passion to find your true purpose. Some careers start with a small interest.
But what happens if we like too many things?
The Rise of Multi-Career Culture
I’m not telling you to find a second job, since it’s kind of silly and usually means that one of them will be something you despise. On my other social accounts that aren’t anonymous, I’m growing a brand.
You could say I’m working my day job and my creative job. And even that is an issue.
I’ve been writing often here about how I want to escape being a software developer, and I was conditioned to believe I need a single creative endeavor to break free. But I’m cursed. Or blessed. It depends on how you phrase it.
I am interested in many things. I’m a multi-creative person.
Jack of all trades master of none comes to mind as the first sentence, but it actually holds the answer.
I had a choice in front of me. Either I continue writing, which is what I loved my entire life, or pursue growing my nonanonymous social following. What if I told you that there was no choice really?
I don’t mean that the path was already set and it was obvious. I meant that the question of choice by itself is false. Why should you choose?
Why shouldn’t you pursue all of them together?
I recently added acting to my arsenal of creativity, and asking whether I wanted to pursue one of the three turned out to be stupid. The simple answer was there all along. Pursue everything!
In my hunt for a single creative job to pay the bills to escape my horrible software developer job, I missed the bigger picture. I can do multiple things that pay differently. All of them together will be my full-time job.
And that’s when I realized that we are all just single-purpose beings with different approaches to life. We are all storytellers. The art form we choose is the medium through which we tell our stories.
And I just love telling stories in three different ways.
I’m not advocating the same choices for everybody. All I’m offering is enlightenment to the fact that we‘re meant to do more than one thing for our entire lives. Life is much more versatile than that.
I’ve been a software developer for seven years now, and I’ll probably do some more time until I manage to free myself. Instead of looking at it as my end goal profession, I accept the fact that I am human. It was a great decade and it’s fine to move on.
If your profession is your end goal, then you’re in the minority of the 1% of the 1%. I congratulate you with true sincerity and jealousy. But for most of us, the pressure of choosing the one goal to rule them all poisons our ability to enjoy life.
If we accept the fact that we change every few years, and with it, our preferences and wishes can change, we’re off to a better start. And with that better start, it would be easier to move on and embark on a new journey.
So what things do you want to do by the time you die?
If you’re wondering how I can manage so many things at once, drop a follow because I’m working on a story about chaotic organization.
In the meanwhile, after you drop a clap or fifty, you can read here why doing nothing is very important:
