One day in Girl Scouts, when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, we were sitting at the tables in the cafeteria, where we met after school once a week. We were doing an exercise to earn a badge, and one of the leaders prompted us with “when I grow up, I want to be…” and the leader’s daughter shouted:
“an alien!”
Her mother was not amused, but we were.
I think I felt bad at the time thst she got in trouble for being so funny. Looking back, I still feel bad (and mad) that this girl’s comedic instincts were being quashed by her own mother. The other thing thst strikes me is thst the reason what she said was so funny was that it aubverted the expected type of answer to that tired question adults are forever asking children. As if children don’t have anything else to think and talk about. Why all this focus on the future? I digress…
Lately, I’ve fallen into living as if my job is not the most important responsibility in my life. It’s been very freeing, though of course there is guilt. I’m trying to learn that a job is not the totality of one’s identity, or one’s life.
I started musing that this false equivalence might have something to do with the time I spent in academia, where the end goal of education (professor) was a model of job=life. It was aspirational. Then I went into the nonprofit sector.
But it goes back farther than that, to the be-anything-you-want-to-be era. Where what you wanted to be was a profession or job: firefighter, astronaut, teacher, police officer, actor…
Kids were not expected to say “I want to be myself.” Or “I want to be generous and content.” Or “I wanna be…an alien!”
job=the totality of being
No wonder so many generations of people are trapped by the false promises of achievement and life fulfillment.
When I grow up, I want to understand that life is many things, lived among many people, and none of us is simply what we do to procure the means of staying alive.
Contemporary Contempt 