“What do you want to do with your life?”
This is a question people my age get a lot. Well, at least I do. It’s like everyone over 30 has a special radar, able to detect even minute lapses in the self-certainty of college-age individuals. Like they just know somehow that I don’t know the answer to this question, but they have to ask anyway. Perhaps they really do care very deeply about my future, but I think it’s far likelier that they simply don’t know what else to talk to me about.
Maybe it’s because I have a freakish knack for pattern-recognition, but from the time I was very young, I noticed the development of an unsettling conversational archetype. Adults, when obliged to engage in discourse with a young person with whom they do not regularly interact, seem to jump to their mental rolodex of “acceptable kid topics.” Unfortunately, this does not exactly spur a wellspring of brilliant ideas, because inevitably, when met with the apparently agonizing task of conversing with a child, adults ask some variation of the following question: “How’s school?”
When I was a kid, this question generally triggered a deep internal groan. But I was a fairly timid child (at least, in the company of authority figures) so outwardly I’d smile sweetly and spew out the clever response I kept at-the-ready for just such circumstances-- the dazzling, enchanting, always-appropriate, satisfying yet surreptitiously non-committal, “Fine.”
I could almost hear adults think, “Oh, shit” as they squirmed and glanced desperately around the room, searching for someone their own age to make bigger small-talk with. And that was fine with me because I never felt like divulging much else anyway. But it always made me wonder what it was about children that made most adults so uncomfortable. It seemed that for grown-ups, kids were like the conversational Bermuda Triangle. Once in a while a half-inspired idea would seep out of their web of panicked cranial chaos, giving rise to inquiries like, “What’s your favorite color?” (The word “color” here can be substituted by other kid-friendly nouns like “animal,” or “TV show,”) but not much else escaped.
And you’d think that as we got older, and the gap of intellectual capacity began to decrease, adults would gradually introduce new topics to us, right? After all, we knew more and experienced more every single day. Surely, some substantial common ground could be found. But peculiarly, as I made transitions through elementary, middle, and high school (even dropping out of high school; boy was THAT a show-stopper), the question about school evolved very little. And questions about my favorite color and the like disappeared entirely, so in fact the scope of conversation grew considerably more narrow, not less.
So I guess it makes sense that now, when I’m in college, a brand new question like, “What do you want to do with your life?” would seem like a stroke of goddamn genius to those who, throughout my coming of age, asked the same tired-ass question over and over and over. But this seemingly innocuous new inquisition carries some troubling connotations.
This query, all wrapped up in one tight little bundle of feigned concern, is actually revealed to be rather probing, and even inappropriate, upon further examination. “What do you want to do with your life?” implies several things:
1. That this really means “What sort of career are you pursuing?”
a. Life = career
2. That I should know by now
a. And if I don’t there’s probably something wrong with me
Not that I can really fault anyone for thinking these things. If I were normal, I’d have no difficulty answering these questions, or at least side-stepping them with more fluency. But the problem is that I’m not normal. I don’t fit into the normative mold, and so far I haven’t done such a good job of pretending to.
The significance of this inexorable fact has recently made a cacophonous uprising in my psyche. Suddenly, the bounds of conventionalism, and everything that has long been expected of me simply because I am alive in the 21st century, seem surmountable, and even wholly avoidable. Finally, I’m thinking about what I really want to do with my life, and it has nothing at all to do with how I’ll make money.
