Pinkerton's Weblog

Est unusquisque faber ipsae suae fortunae

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

It's odd that I'm asked this, and think this, far more than I ever did before I actually grew up. The truth is, I have no idea. I'm beginning to suspect that any job, done eight hours a day for thirty years, will become rote and dull. And, though it's a simple and obvious maxim, I try to get my pleasures after work. The work is there to pay for those things.

But still -- what did you want to be when you grew up? Even if there isn't any such thing as a "perfect" job -- and, merely by defining the word "job", I suspect there isn't -- what did you SEE yourself doing?

It's a loaded question, really. Before I grew up -- let's say age eight -- I might have had some vague inkling of what I'd want to do with my life. But as an eight year old, I didn't really have any concept of what a job, or even adulthood, really was. I think when I was younger I wanted to be either a writer or a cartoonist. Of course, given that I was eight, my concept of either was pretty blurry at best. Most of my fantasies of being a famous writer, come to think of it, didn't really involve the actual "writing of books," so much as fantasies diretly concerning the praise and adulation I would receive FROM the books I would have, at some point, presumably written.

"Where do you get your ideas?" I would hypothetically be asked all the time, to the point of mock irritation on my part.

"Ha ha," I'd demure. "I don't know," I'd then say, since I was eight at the time of the fantasy and wasn't ready for tough questions like that.

I eventually became, despite all efforts to the contrary, a young adult. Suddenly I DID have ideas for books. My brain was alive with everything -- ideas and philosophies and problems and situations I was encountering for the first time. It never occured to me, as it never does any teenager, that the ideas I'd thought of weren't actually mine, that I wasn't the first to have them. Subsequent reading bore this out.

(As an aside, I'm sure we've all had that experience in talking to someone our age who, out of the blue, comes to a blazing epiphany that we'd already worked out some ten years before. It always strikes me as hilarious to see this in action. Did this honestly never occur to you before?)

And then early, real, adulthood. And, once again, I have nothing to write about. Nothing to write about WELL, anyway. Back to square one. And, judging from many books I read, most other folks don't have anything to say well either (not that this stops them, the inspiring little troupers). And so, when I reflect back on what it is I want to do with my life, in the absence of great ideas, I once again revert to the same fantasy I had as a pre-teen. Namely, I've already written the books, and am being lauded with praise for them. It's nice.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

Not grown up.