What are you going to be when you grow up?
Posted by: Jenny Penny in Age, Education, I've been thinking..., Unemployment, WorkWhat are you going be when you grow up? Who hasn’t been asked that question. As young children, we answer that we want to be fire-fighters, rock stars, football players, ballet dancers, fighter pilots (that was me). And that answer is seen as cute and filled with innocent hopes and dreams. It may even be encouraged, with ballet lessons, soccer practice, and a child sized fire-fighter costume for playing dress-up.
Then we enter the school system. Here, we are expected to sit down and be quiet, until it’s time for P.E. class, when we are instead expected to jump and cartwheel on command. We are supposed to be children, to be innocent and playful and curious. “Kids are growing up too fast these days” complain the adults and point to 12 year old girls in short skirts and eye shadow. “What are their parents thinking, they look like sluts!”, they say, while bemoaning that the 12 year old girls are being called “bitch” by their class mates. No, we are not supposed to grow up too fast. Not when it comes to clothes and make up and sex and drinking. But at 15, we are expected to make choices that, say the adults with very serious voices, are determinant for our future. And you need to know long division to pass this course, if you don’t pass it that is going in your grades, and your future employer will want to look at those grades, so you better learn long division, otherwise you may be doomed, doomed I tell you!
Now, when being asked what we are going to be when we grow up, answering football player or rock star or ballet dancer isn’t cute and innocently hopeful any longer. By now we need to have realized that life isn’t fair and that those were just silly dreams (not having realized this is usually the fault of lax parenting and a school system that puts to much time into drawing and singing and talking about feelings instead of teaching life-necessary skills such as long division and sitting down and shutting up).
The “perfect girls” in this age are now dreaming of becoming lawyers and doctors and international aid workers. They are striving for perfection, for getting those good grades that everyone tells them are so important, and they know that it’s never too early to have a good CV and make yourself employable, so they do volunteer work and start projects and write blogs. (I say girls, because it largely seems to be girls who are striving for this kind of perfection). But somehow that is wrong too, they are being told. Don’t they realize that perfection is impossible? Don’t they realize that there is more to life than getting a high status “exciting” job? Don’t they realize that you need time to relax and “just be”?
When we’re out of school, we are given some leeway. When you’re 20, it’s kind of okay to work in a café, save money and then go off to Laos for three months. Sitting around playing guitar hoping to land a record contract is frowned upon, but can be looked by if it is “only a phase”. But then you pretty much have two choices - either get a job and then it’s pretty much expected that you “settle down” (oh how I loathe that phrase!) and start a family, or you go to university and further your education, thereby putting off the “settling down” thing a few years (but not too many!). And then you really need to think about what you are going to be when you grow up (because even if you have moved away from home, travelled alone in Turkmenistan, held 10 different jobs and live with your long time partner, you still haven’t “grown up”).
(Here, I diverge from the story a little to dwell on the fact that today in society, we lack rites of passage of becoming an adult. Before, you we’re an adult when you had gone through confirmation in church. At a certain age, you we’re expected to lay off your children’s clothes and were given the superficial attributes of adulthood - a woman’s coat and gloves, a man’s costume and hat. Nowadays, we have nothing like that, and transferring into adulthood is a process which takes years. I’m 28, married, have two university degrees, have worked a number of jobs, have all kinds of life experiences, but according to some people I’m still not really an adult, since I have no children or a permanent job - the ultimate signs of having “settled down” and thus being a true, productive member of society - an adult.)
Young people today, and by young I know mean 20-somethings, feel life anxiety, known as the quarter life crisis. A sense of not knowing what to do, of lacking direction and purpose. We are told that we should enjoy life as it is now, that we should stop worrying about the future and about the status stress of having a perfect dream job, a perfect home, a perfect life. We are also told to get our act together, cut our hair and get a job, because life ain’t easy, missy, so suck it up and realize that you’re five year university education didn’t get you anywhere, but you should have thought of that before studying whatever crap you did.
So go make a decent living now and earn money, but remember that money isn’t everything. Remember that you have only one life so be sure to live it to the fullest, but life isn’t supposed to be fun so what are you doing playing around like that. Stop caring so much what other people think and remember to do what YOU feel is right for YOU, but how can you be so selfish and how can you have pictures like that on your Facebook profile, how on earth do you think that someone like YOU is going to get a job ever (and by the way, how can you dress like that and dye your hair that colour, you look absolutely disgraceful, but young people today care too much about how they look). And remember that life isn’t over when you’re thirty, but what are you doing still working at that café at 32, aren’t you supposed to get a real job soon? And remember that you are not getting any younger and that biological clock should be ticking by now and isn’t it time to start a family, but what on earth are you thinking having a baby before you have a job and an apartment and a car and….
Can we excuse the young for being a bit confused?
People of all ages bemoan the fact that we are stuck in the hamster wheel that the French call dodo-metro-boulot (sleep-metro-work). Kilometers of newspaper columns have been written about how we, rich and poor alike, are overworked and lack time to “just be”. But yet, if you’re not in that wheel, you want to be. Because without that, we are basically no-one. Answering the question “what are you going to be when you grow up” with the most obvious answer: “older, if I’m still alive” doesn’t cut it in today’s society, other than as a joke. To “be” is not to live, to think, eat, breathe and love, to “be” in this sense automatically means having a profession, a job. To answer the question that you are asked by basically every new person you meet - “so, what do you do?” - with the world “live” is weird, and will surely get nervous laughter and a “no I mean, what do you do for a living?”. Or the question “what have you done today?”. If you answer “nothing” you are sure to get some sour looks and a mumbling about wasting a whole day just hanging around. If course in reality, you are always doing something, even if it is just sitting around staring into space. But doing means producing, and doing “nothing” needs to be earned by hard work (it is okay to have a “do nothing”-weekend after a long work week, but to have a “do nothing”-summer when you’re 18 is lazy and will make you less employable).
I produce therefore I am.
Because without producing, we can’t take part in the other activity which creates “being” - consumption. Without that, we are also basically no-one. Someone wants us to believe that without consumption, society will collapse. So eventually most of us will cut our hair and get a job, enter the hamster wheel. Sleep-metro-work-shop.
I am not saying that life was easier before. In many ways, life is infinitely better for me than it was for my parents and grandparents. But when industrialization and mechanization was young, it was foretold that it would mean less work and more time to “just be”. Instead, we work as never before (and are frequently told that it’s still not enough). I noticed in the comments section of the linked articles above, that old people, pensioners, were a lot more sympathetic to the feelings described by the quarter life crisis affected 20-somethings. They understood the feelings of being useless in a society which at the same time rewards youth, but won’t allow the young to gain the necessary experience, and throws away the old who hold that experience. When Ericsson offers redundancy payments to people over 35, is it so hard to understand that a 28 year old without a job is panicking and feeling insecure about the future?
Why are we in such a rush to put people in moulds, to take away their dreams and hopes? Why such a rush to create producers and consumers, when so many of us agree that life is so much more than that, and that the current world order is not sustainable, neither for the earth nor for its inhabitants?
Maybe we should change the question from “what are you going to be when you grow up?” to “who are you going to be when you grow up?”. That would take the focus away from producing and from being defined by what you do in terms of production, and focus instead of who we are, and want to be, as human beings.
Thoughts?
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