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

TheCatWoman

I've never had an ambition, or a goal/s in life, at 63 I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know if it's because I was never encouraged to do anything when I was a child, although I was often discouraged. If like most little girls I said I wantd to be a nurse, I was told that I wouldn't really want to that as it would involve carrying used bed pans around. A wish to be a hairdresser was met with disgust.

We had no careers advice at school, or at least not until we'd made our exam choices and it was to late to change anything. Some of the teachers said there was no point in educating us as we'd only go off and get married and have babies.

After leaving school, I was asked what I wanted to do and could never answer, I simply didn't know, I remember being told to search through a filing cabinet of folders about possible careers and found nothing, I was just overwhelmed. I think it also didn't help that a "career" was a fairly new thing, for people of my class, we's always had "jobs", which was a very different thing.

How did you find the thing you wanted to do, or do you still not know?

Do you do the job you trained for? 

Parents

  • I want to add to this. Did you think you were normal or average? I always felt different, not surprisingly, but I felt I had to achieve more, that I was above average.

    Being single with one income and navigating an uncertain world, I have not achieved what I wanted and feel I am behind people who worked less hard in terms of housing, although I have maybe done more. I wonder if my priorities were right 

    I feel I have underachieved. It is hard.

    Perhaps if I'd known what I wanted and was not so confused it would have been better.

  • in reply to Stuart333

    I'm mystified as to how people know what they want to do, often from such a young age, I think some people must arrive on this planet knowing what they want.

    I tried to hide how below average I knew I was, like the realisation that at 11 I didn't really know the alphabet, it still gives me problems and if I'm trying to think of what comes after a letter I have to start at the begining.All my school reports were of the could do better variety.

    I think I and many of my contemporaries were left in a sort of vacumn, we were a generation on the edge of changes, jobs had been fairly easy to get in the post war years and the assumption seemed to be that this was going to continue. There were massive social changes too, things like discrimination based on gender were being legislated against, contraception was being made available to unmarried women. Automation was beinging to impact the workplace and computers came along behind them quite rapidly. Many of our teachers couldn't or didn't want to cope with this new world and seemed to be stuck in some kind of Enid Blyton world, I remember the whole class being shouted at by one male teacher that there was little point in teaching girls as we'd all go off and have babies. There was never any encouragement to do anything and often there would be no one from the whole school going on to higher education, let alone university, when someone did, they were up on the stage at assembly being congratualted. School was more of a warehouse for teenage girls than a place of education.

  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    TheCatWoman said:
    I'm mystified as to how people know what they want to do, often from such a young age

    For me it was having physic teachers who were actually passionate about their subject and made it interesting.

    Being able to understand the building blocks of the atoms through to the massiveness of the universe possibly appealled because I was a knowledge hungry student and the way things could be quantified through the laws of physics really struck a cord.

    Those teachers were the ones encouraging the learning, the passion and ambition to get into breaking the frontiers of science.

    I did go on to do all those things and was bored sensless by it however - there was no excitement and I ended up reaching to fast motorbikes, women and booze for the thrills. Then I settled down, got all sensible and got a jot in IT.

    These days with the increasing amount of unknown stuff that is now turning the laws of physics into kindergarden rules is a little concerning.

    For example you know there are 3 spacial dimensions (up/down, side/side, back/front) and 1 time dimension? Well it looks like there may be 3 time dimensions ( https://phys.org/news/2025-06-theory-dimensions-space-secondary-effect.html ) which makes time travel and the multiverse theory more quantifiable.

    Even quantum mechanics was a pretty acid tripping experience back in the 1980s when I was at uni but now it has grown so much and gotten so weird that I'm reluctant to even try to keep up to date with it.

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  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    TheCatWoman said:
    I'm mystified as to how people know what they want to do, often from such a young age

    For me it was having physic teachers who were actually passionate about their subject and made it interesting.

    Being able to understand the building blocks of the atoms through to the massiveness of the universe possibly appealled because I was a knowledge hungry student and the way things could be quantified through the laws of physics really struck a cord.

    Those teachers were the ones encouraging the learning, the passion and ambition to get into breaking the frontiers of science.

    I did go on to do all those things and was bored sensless by it however - there was no excitement and I ended up reaching to fast motorbikes, women and booze for the thrills. Then I settled down, got all sensible and got a jot in IT.

    These days with the increasing amount of unknown stuff that is now turning the laws of physics into kindergarden rules is a little concerning.

    For example you know there are 3 spacial dimensions (up/down, side/side, back/front) and 1 time dimension? Well it looks like there may be 3 time dimensions ( https://phys.org/news/2025-06-theory-dimensions-space-secondary-effect.html ) which makes time travel and the multiverse theory more quantifiable.

    Even quantum mechanics was a pretty acid tripping experience back in the 1980s when I was at uni but now it has grown so much and gotten so weird that I'm reluctant to even try to keep up to date with it.

Children