What do you want to be when you grow up?

When we are children or teenagers, it is perfectly natural to keep asking ourselves what we want to be when we grow up.

The answer can change almost as often as we change our socks. At that age, we are still trying to discover what we are good at. The future appears to contain an endless number of possibilities, although our ideas about them are usually based on an impressive combination of imagination and ignorance.

One of my sons developed fairly definite ideas about this at an early age.  For a while, he wanted to be a pizza delivery driver.  He was clearly fascinated by the idea of driving around town, handing people pizzas and collecting the money.

He had exactly the same idea about the man who pumped petrol into cars.  That job also seemed to involve serving people at their car and then accepting payment through the window.

Perhaps what appealed to him most was that these men did not appear to have to be particularly old to be entrusted with such important work and then putting the money in their pocket.

Children who are serious about sport often have an equally clear plan. Every boy who can kick a football intends to become a professional player. This was probably true even in my generation, including for a boy growing up on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic.

Reality is allowed to wait.

The first serious choice

When compulsory schooling ends, the first real decisions about the future have to be made.

Today, most young people continue into some form of further education. In my generation, some left school and went directly into the workforce. Others chose vocational education or an academic route that could eventually lead to university.

Many of our parents had not received extensive formal education themselves, so there was understandable pressure on their children to pursue academic studies. That suited some very well. It suited others much less.

Some struggled through secondary school, entered university and then drifted from one department to another, hoping the next subject would finally feel right. Eventually, some gave up and entered the labour market without qualifications, often doing work that gave them little satisfaction and made poor use of their natural abilities.

Career guidance was almost nonexistent. Many would probably have been happier and more successful if vocational education had been presented as a respected first choice rather than something one settled for after academic studies did not work out.

Others simply started doing whatever work was available. They did not go off the rails and did not necessarily dislike their lives. They worked, supported families and fulfilled their responsibilities. But they may have spent years moving goods, processing payments, answering telephones or doing countless other necessary jobs without ever having specifically wanted to do any of them.

There is nothing dishonourable about that. Most societies would stop functioning within days without people who simply turn up and do the work.

But it is still worth asking whether earning a living and finding one’s proper place in life are always the same thing.

When did we stop asking?

By the age of twenty, we are somehow expected to have become adults and to be on our way to becoming something.

A fourteen-year-old will usually tell you that he is almost fifteen. At that age, every additional year moves him closer to adulthood, freedom and the mysterious privileges supposedly waiting there. He is in a hurry to become older.

Once adulthood has been reached, the arithmetic changes. Instead of being nearly twenty-one, we have only just turned twenty. Later, we may remain forty-nine for as long as possible before reluctantly admitting that fifty has arrived.

We spend the first part of life hurrying toward adulthood and much of the rest wondering why it came and went so quickly.

Between twenty and thirty, adult life gradually begins to take shape . Work, relationships, children, bills and obligations arrive, often without waiting to be formally invited.

We believe we have plenty of time. Then life moves with astonishing speed, and suddenly we are in our forties.

By then, some people have found a road that suits them and are well established in work they enjoy. Many others are doing perfectly respectable work that was never really part of a plan. They found employment, became competent and carried on, even though the occupation may never have used their strongest abilities or given them any particular sense of purpose.

A few—fortunately not many—lose their footing more seriously. Alcohol, drugs or other forms of disorder may gradually take over and pull them far from the road they once intended to follow.

Even then, the road back does not necessarily disappear. But returning to it usually requires more than waiting for circumstances to improve on their own.

I once heard the stages of adult life summarised like this: Between twenty and forty, we educate ourselves and establish a career. Between forty and sixty, we make use of what we have built. After sixty, our main concern becomes whether we can urinate and move our bowels properly.

It is a rather severe reduction of later life, although any man approaching seventy will admit that the subject is not entirely without relevance.

From the time we enter the workforce until retirement begins to appear on the horizon, life moves quickly and keeps us occupied. Some people change direction along the way. If they discover work that suits them better, that is a good thing.

But what happens when working life starts to loosen its grip?

Still undecided at sixty-seven

I do not have a simple answer, despite being sixty-seven years old.

I am still asking what I want to be when I grow up.

Many people use retirement to spend more time on hobbies or with their grandchildren, to travel or simply to enjoy life if their circumstances allow it.

All of that can be valuable. But when it comes to hobbies, it probably helps to have discovered one or two before the day arrives when we suddenly have unlimited time available.

It is not always easy to invent a passion on command.

I am no exception. Apart from regular exercise, I never developed many hobbies. I put almost all my energy into work.

The idea for Nordic Wolves emerged partly from that realisation. It gave me something new to build—something that matters to me, genuinely interests me and allows me to make use of a lifetime of experience.

That is different from simply finding a way to fill the hours.

We should probably begin thinking about this sometime after fifty, rather than waiting until the last day of work. People are living longer, and later life can offer far more than earlier generations were led to expect.

There are courses to take, skills to learn, places to visit and projects to create. Many people take up golf, often with a partner or a group of friends. Others return to interests they abandoned decades earlier.

But there is no standard retirement package that suits everyone.

Living as though the future still matters

It may be healthy to look toward the future almost as though we were immortal.

Not because we are. That inconvenient detail remains unchanged.

But we can plant trees, build houses, learn something difficult and begin projects that may take years. There is nothing wrong with knitting socks for the grandchildren, but it does not have to constitute the entire plan for the rest of one’s life.

Perhaps we should continue asking the question we asked so freely as children:

What do I want to be when I grow up?

At this age, the question no longer means: What occupation should I choose?

It means: What do I still want to learn? What do I want to create? Where do I want to go? Who do I want beside me? What part of myself have I never properly used?

The experience accumulated over a long life has real value. We should not continue defining ourselves only by the job title that occupied us for decades. Nor should we assume that the most interesting part of life must already be over.

A child looks toward the future with excitement because almost anything seems possible. We know better now. Not everything is possible.

But far more may still be possible than we allow ourselves to believe.

A useful place to begin is with three short lists:

What do I want to stop doing?

What do I want to continue doing?

What have I always wanted to begin but never made time for?

Then choose one item and take the first real step within the next month. Not another year of preparation, discussion or thinking about thinking. One actual step.

At sixty-seven, I still do not know exactly what I am going to be when I grow up.

Perhaps that is the point: as long as there is still something left to become, there is still a future.